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FBI Offers New Chechen Terror Link
Friday, September 20, 2002
By Natalia Yefimova
Staff Writer

Military police escorting a detainee at the prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Seven Russians are reportedly being held there.
Image Credit: Lynne Sladky -- AP.

"Although al-Qaida functions independently of other terrorist organizations, it also functions through some of the terrorist organizations that operate under its umbrella or with its support, including [jihad groups in] ... the Chechen region of Russia," an FBI counterterrorism official said in a congressional statement last December.

New evidence of links between Chechen rebels and the al-Qaida terrorist network emerged this week as the FBI warned that al-Qaida had planned to use Muslims of "non-Arabic appearance," including extremists from Chechnya, to hijack a commercial airliner in the United States.

"Purportedly, al-Qaida members have discussed using Chechnyan [sic] Muslims affiliated with al-Qaida, but already present in the U.S., for such operations in order to avoid security scrutiny at airports,'' the FBI said in a bulletin released Wednesday and quoted by the Los Angeles Times.

The warning, which appears to be based on "discussions'' among al-Qaida members prior to last year's Sept. 11 terror attacks, implicitly serves to buttress Russian claims about cooperation between Chechen rebels and international terrorist groups.

An FBI spokesman said, however, that the media had made more of the bulletin than it was worth.
(More: TheMoscowTimes.com News Source)
2002 © The Moscow Times.

Dan