From Deseret News archives:
Spain query links Syrians to 9/11 attacks in U.S.
As laid out in the indictment, the defendants' alleged activities — from arranging travel and providing introductions to procuring false documents and, especially, moving money — provide the first detailed look at one of al-Qaida's most potent weapons: the ability to call on networks of sympathizers whose collective numbers are far greater than al-Qaida's few hundred card-carrying members.
Not one of the dozen key defendants named here last month as members or supporters of an alleged Madrid-based cell accused of working for al-Qaida and helping advance the Sept. 11 plot is a native of Spain, or even nearby Muslim North Africa.
Instead, all migrated to Spain from the Middle Eastern nation of Syria, where — according to the Spanish indictment — most became affiliated with an ultramilitant Islamic group called the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood.
Virtually from the moment of the Sept. 11 attacks, investigators in Europe and the United States were perplexed by what appeared to be a Syrian connection to the hijackings, both here and in Hamburg, Germany, whose university campuses produced three of the four Sept. 11 pilots and several accused or convicted accomplices.
At first, some questioned whether the Syrian government had perhaps known of the plot, or even whether Syrian intelligence had somehow been involved. Neither now appears to be true, investigators say, citing Syria's limited but useful cooperation with Western intelligence agencies attempting to unravel the connection between Sept. 11, al-Qaida and the Muslim Brotherhood.
One senior German intelligence official described the Muslim Brotherhood as "one part of the intelligence network of the mujahedeen." The Brothers, the official said, are not an extension of al-Qaida but affiliated with it in the same way as Indonesia's Jemaah Islamiyah, which reportedly financed last year's Bali nightclub bombings with $30,000 provided by al-Qaida, or a Salafist group in Morocco that allegedly used $50,000 in al-Qaida money to pay for five suicide bombings in Casablanca earlier this year.
When al-Qaida first appeared on the terrorist scene in the early 1990s, the Muslim Brotherhood was already well-established. It was 70 years ago last year that the Syrian Brotherhood, an offshoot of the even older Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, first dedicated itself to the overthrow of Syria's secular government.
