SARAJEVO, Sept 28 (Hina) - A group of 70 members of the Al-Quaida terrorist organisation is planning to leave Afghanistan and come to Bosnia-Herzegovina to avoid America's possible retaliation for attacks in New York and Washington,
the interior minister of the Croat-Muslim Bosnian Federation, Muhamed Besic, said on Friday.
SARAJEVO, Sept 28 (Hina) - A group of 70 members of the Al-Quaida
terrorist organisation is planning to leave Afghanistan and come to
Bosnia-Herzegovina to avoid America's possible retaliation for
attacks in New York and Washington, the interior minister of the
Croat-Muslim Bosnian Federation, Muhamed Besic, said on
Friday.#L#
The police throughout Bosnia have been put on maximum alert with the
task of preventing those people from entering the country at any
cost, Besic told reporters.
Information that the followers of the most wanted terrorist, Osama
bin Laden, have such plans has been provided to Sarajevo by "very
reliable intelligence sources," he added.
"I would like to tell those people that if they think they will find
a haven here, they should know only living hell awaits them," the
interior minister of the Croat-Muslim entity said.
He confirmed that police and Bosnian security services were
cooperating with the NATO-led international peace-keepers (SFOR)
and taking necessary measures to counter any terrorist attack.
Besic said that in the wake of the devastating attacks in the United
States, SFOR had received additional authorities as to the
protection of Western nationals in Bosnia.
According to Besic, SFOR is searching for possible terrorists and
their accessories on its own as well.
So far, the federal police have nabbed five persons, four of whom
are suspected of being linked with terrorism and the fifth one, a
Turk, has been arrested for his involvement in drug trafficking and
extradited to Germany.
Of four arrested Arabs, two have already been handed over to France
and the other two are being kept in prisons in Sarajevo and Zenica
awaiting transfer to Egypt, where they will be tried for crimes they
committed there earlier.
These four were given Bosnian citizenship, but were subsequently
stripped of it for providing false data or having a criminal record
in other countries.
Bosnian authorities are thoroughly checking all naturalised
Bosnian who received citizenship since 1992 in order to identify
potential terrorists.
Minister Besic said the recent crack-down on arms smugglers showed
that local police did their job properly.
Five persons have been apprehended to date for smuggling weapons to
Kosovo. Two of them are a former head of the federal interior
ministry's department of anti-commando teams, Mirza Jamakovic, and
another employee of this department, Adil Babic. The third suspect
is Velid Hajdarevic, an employee of the secret service 'AID'.
Minister Basic said an investigation in the case was going on, and
declined to say anything more about it.
The Sarajevo press speculates that the traffic in arms was carried
out under the auspices of some senior federal officials, which
Besic categorically refuted.
According to reports by 'Dnevni Avaz' daily, this chain of
smugglers managed to transfer weapons from Bosnia for about 50,000
people in Kosovo. The arms were provided to the ethnic Albanians'
army, the Liberation Army of Kosovo (OVK), and part will likely be
smuggled further to the Irish Republican Army (IRA). According to
the same daily, senior officials of the police and army of both
entities (the Federation and the Bosnian Serb republic) have been
involved in this smuggling chain.
(hina) ms