On the trail of Bin Laden: Albania


UNITED States investigators tracking Osama Bin Laden have reportedly been sent to Albania, where the exiled Saudi dissident has had a base for several years.

Agents from the Central Intelligence Agency and Federal Bureau of Investigation are in Tirana, the Albanian capital, trying to locate Arab mercenaries who are believed to be planning to use Albania as a springboard for terrorist attacks in the rest of Europe.

Joint raids in recent years in Tirana by the CIA and Shik, the Albanian secret service, have led to several arrests but more terrorists linked to bin Laden are believed to be hiding in the country, much of which is controlled by clan leaders, making it hard for the government to hunt down terrorist suspects.

Bin Laden arrived in Albania in 1994, posing as a wealthy Saudi Arabian businessman keen to offer help to charities rebuilding mosques and schools and bringing medicine and food to Europe’s poorest country after the fall of the communist regime.

However, bin Laden is believed to have used aid work as a cover to infiltrate his operatives into the country. In a 1998 estimate, Shik said it had evidence of operatives from Algeria, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and several other Middle Eastern nations.

Police believe bin Laden might have taken advantage of the theft of 100,000 Albanian passports during the chaos of a 1997 popular uprising in the wake of collapsed pyramid schemes. Infiltrating bin Laden operatives into the rest of Europe from Albania would be simple. In possession of the stolen passports, the terrorists could make use of gangs who regularly smuggle illegal immigrants across the Adriatic to Italy.

The US moved against bin Laden following the bombing of its embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998. That same summer, CIA and Shik units arrested several men who were wanted by Egypt for plotting terrorist acts. The men were extradited to Egypt, tried and executed

The spotlight fell on bin Laden in Albania with the arrest in 1998 of a French passport holder, Claude Kader, who was believed to be of Middle Eastern origin. He confessed to being a member of one of bin Laden’s groups and told investigators he had been sent to give weapons to the guerrillas of the Kosovo Liberation Army, then beginning their war against the Serbs. The KLA had promised US officials it would not co-operate with fundamentalists. Mr Kader said the KLA had turned him down and that he had returned to Albania, still with his weapons. A few weeks later, after a row in his flat in Tirana, he shot dead his Albanian interpreter and was tried for murder. However, he told prosecutors that four other bin Laden operatives remained at large.

In response the US turned its Tirana embassy into a fortress, with concrete barricades and watch towers with machine-guns. A massive intelligence effort to track down the rest of bin Laden’s organisation also resulted.