Web role examined in London, Madrid bombings

Reuters - BERLIN -- Investigations into the Madrid and London bombings highlight two worrying trends for European security services -- the emergence of autonomous, homegrown radical cells and their skilled exploitation of the Internet.

A Spanish judge investigating the train bombs that killed 191 people in Madrid in March 2004 reported today that the attacks were carried out by a local group of Islamic militants who were inspired -- but not directed -- by al-Qaeda, taking their cue from an Islamist Web site.

On Sunday, Britain's Observer newspaper quoted a draft government report on last July's London attacks as saying the four young suicide bombers were not part of an international terrorist network but had devised their own "simple and inexpensive" plot, again using information from the Net.

Still unexplained are the significance of trips to Pakistan by two of the bombers and of a video released nearly two months after the blasts in which ringleader Mohammed Sidique Khan and al-Qaeda No. 2 man Ayman al-Zawahri appeared in separate segments. The bombers killed 52 people.

In the wake of Madrid, London and other cases, police and security services across Europe have had to revise their previous perception that militant threats were more likely to come from outside their countries.

'Made in Europe'

The chief worry now is "made in Europe" radicals, and the possibility that the same kind of cells that struck Spain and Britain could pop up elsewhere using a similar modus operandi, said Claude Moniquet, head of the European Strategic Intelligence and Security Center in Brussels.

He said the local nature of the threat made it harder to spot, because those involved may not have forged the kind of contacts with militant circles that could bring them to the attention of police and intelligence services.

Whereas an earlier generation of radicals was trained in al-Qaeda's Afghan camps in the 1980s and 1990s, their equivalents today are frequently schooled on the World Wide Web.

"It is quite clear that the Internet is playing an ever greater role in radicalization and recruitment, and indeed also in facilitating the practical planning [of attacks]," European Union counterterrorism chief Gijs de Vries told a conference in Berlin last week.

Britain's top antiterrorist police officer, Peter Clarke, told the same audience that investigators had last year come across the first known example of a conspiracy hatched entirely over the Internet.

"I think it's the first time we've found a 'virtual network.' The people concerned in it have been charged with conspiring to cause an explosion, but we don't actually have any evidence they have ever met," he said.

An investigation code-named Operation Mazhar led to charges against three men, two of them with conspiracy to murder and conspiracy to cause an explosion, and the third with terrorist fund raising.

Asked if it was conceivable that total strangers could put together a successful attack via the Internet, Clarke said: "I think that's entirely feasible. I can't see anything to stop it."