On Monday, Milan's Il Giornale carried a report on an Italia 1 "investigation into the assassination of Don Andrea Santoro in Turkey and the danger of radical Islam in Europe and in Italy."
The "Studio aperto Live" (Open Studio Live) investigative program featured exclusive videotape of an Islamist conference held in Modena one year before September 11, 2001. The tape was siezed by Italy's "Anti-Terrorism agency in 2002 in the residence of Mourad Trabelsi, a Tunisian now in jail accused of collusion with the Moroccan Combatant Islamic Group and with Ansar al-Islam, the first Iraqi suicide bomber group."
Also present as a guest speaker at the Jihadist meeting, Il Giornale reports, was the "imam of Copenhagen, Ahmed Rahman Abu Laban (on the left), who instigated the Muslim world's protest against the [Jyllands-Posten] cartoons of Muhammad," and Mohammed al-Fizazi (below, right) who was "arrested in Morocco and sentenced to 30 years in prison as the ideologist of the Casablanca massacres of" May 16, 2003.
Fizazi, who has called Usama bin Ladin a "companion of the prophet," was trained in Saudi Arabia, "officially sanctioned" by the Saudi government as an imam in Tangiers, Morocco and "was subsequently sent to Europe by the monarchy to spread Islam."
In Europe - specifically Hamburg, Germany - Fizazi spread the Salafist strain of Islam while he was imam of Hamburg's al-Quds mosque. Attending his sermons at Al-Quds in 1998 and 1999 were three of the four 9-11 pilots; Mohamed Atta, Marwan Al-Shehhi and Ziad Jarrah.
Fizazi is also linked to Frenchman Jamal Zougam, one of the prime suspects accused of plotting the Madrid train bombings on March 11, 2004. Spanish police tapped a phone call Zougam made in August 2001 in which he was overheard saying that he had met and offered financial aid to Fizazi.
Zougam, as it turns out, is linked to the recently jailed, UK Islamist Abu Hamza al-Masri (left). Zougam visited the Finsbury Park mosque during a trip to the UK.
In the videotape obtained by Italia One Mohammed Fizazi states, "All democratic thinking is in opposition to Islamic thinking. All the democratic objectives collide with the Islamic objectives...we have only one very great freedom, that of being free within the limits, the bonds of the shari'a (the law of the Qur'an). There is no freedom of prostitution in our country, the country of Islam. There is no freedom to fornicate, to consume alcoholic drinks, to wear make-up. There is no freedom for apostates in Islam."
And no freedom of press if it contravenes Islamic law.
Ahmed Rahman Abu Laban's cartoon jihad may not involve planes flying into buildings, suicide bombers on subway cars or bombs left on trains, but his 'benign' cartoon jihad shares the same vision as Fizazi's violent jihad: "Between us and the unbelievers there is hatred. The enmity and hatred will reign between us and them forever, until they believe in Allah alone."
The full text in English and Italian of the Il Giornale article can be found here.
Below is my July 29, 2003, investigation into Mohammed Fizazi
***
Tuesday July 29, 2003
A Brain Trust of Psycopaths: Moroccan Cleric Accused in Casablanca Plots also Involved with Hamburg Cell
On July 24th India's leading counter-terror expert K. P. S. Gill spoke at the American Foreign Policy Council's Asia-Pacific Initiative.
Mr. Gill rightfully asserted that the engine that drives al-Qai'da is a 'brain trust' of radical Islamic clerics (In the same AFPC forum, Mr. Gill claimed that elements of Pakistan's ISI know where Usama bin Laden is).
The Al Qaeda network may be driven by an extremist religious 'brain trust', operating behind the scenes and providing its followers with ideological underpinnings for terrorist attacks, according to counter-terrorism expert K P S Gill, who is credited with wiping out militancy from Punjab.
"It is a brain trust bent on world conquest, Islamic conquest," Gill said in a speech at the American Foreign Policy Council in Washington.
Echoing Gill's view, a senior US official was quoted by the Washington Post saying that the idea of a 'secret religious hierarchy behind the Al Qaeda network' was being investigated.
One key piece of evidence was the videotape obtained in Afghanistan, in which Al Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden is seen explaining the September 11 attacks, the official said.
On the tape, Laden spoke as though reporting to a Saudi cleric named Al Ghamdi.
Investigators are probing whether Al Ghamdi is connected to a network of Islamic extremist religious leaders who are behind Al Qaeda, the official said.
[ed. note: The cleric bin Ladin is seen reporting to in the videotape is now known to be the Saudi Shaykh Khaled al-Harbi (aka Abu Sulaiman al-Makki).]
It should be noted that the videotape in which bin Laden is seen explaining the 9-11 attacks to Khaled al-Harbi was most likely made in the same Kandahar guest house where the final details of the plot were hammered out during an al-Qa'ida council consisting of the the four 'pilots' (Atta, Jarrah and Al-Shehhi of the Hamburg cell along with the Saudi Hanjour) and other key players (including Binalshibh of the Hamburg cell, who would have participated in the attacks had he been able to obtain a visa, along with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed) in late November-early December, 1999.
The 'religious' figure that "operated behind the scenes" of the Hamburg cell and provided it with it's "ideological underpinnings for terrorist attacks" would be Mohamed Fizazi, alias Abou Mariam.
Fizazi was the imam of Hamburg's al-Quds mosque which the Hamburg conspirators frequented during their radicalization in 1998 and 1999.
[German] Police and intelligence officials said the imam...preached an unusually heated stream of anti-Western and anti-Jewish abuse at the mosque.
The German police have no evidence that Mr. Fazazi was involved in the attacks on Sept. 11. But investigators are intrigued by the number of paths that cross his door. His hate-filled message, the fact that he left Hamburg before Sept. 11 and his ties with people involved in the attacks have all attracted the attention of the German police.
Mr. Fazazi said that "Christians and Jews should have their throats slit" and called on followers to "fight the Americans as long as they are keeping Muslims in prison," according to videotaped sermons seized earlier this month in raids by the Hamburg state police on a bookstore two blocks from the mosque, the police said.
The police said they believed that the sermons offered a religious justification to the extremists who organized the attacks. Mr. Atta and two other suspected pilots of hijacked aircraft were among five Arabs implicated in the attacks who attended Al Quds.
Like some of the other conspirators, Mr. Atta came to Hamburg as a university student in 1992 and gradually embraced a radical brand of Islam, people who knew him said. Authorities now believe that Mr. Fazazi may have played a role in Mr. Atta's transformation into a suicide pilot, but the stages of Mr. Atta's conversion from student to plotter remain unclear.
Fizazi, from Tangiers, left Germany for Morocco prior to September 11, where he continued his incitement of jihad and attacks against Western and Jewish targets.
It turns out that Fizazi is the chief 'theoretician' for the Islamist terror group Salafia Jihadia.
SJ and its members are accused of planning and carrying out the Casablanca attacks in May of this year in which 44 persons were killed and plotting yet more carnage in Morocco.
Fizazi now sits in a Casablanca jail awaiting trial, set to begin on Friday.
Officially, Fizazi is charged with "inciting Jihad and violence" but is also accused of sending coded messages about future terror targets in an interview with a Moroccan newspaper in late May [ed. note: Fizazi was eventually convicted of undermining state security, criminal association, sabotage and inciting violence. He was sentenced to 30 years in the slammer].
Mohamed Fizazi it can undoubtedly be said, using K. P. S. Gill's phrase, is a member of an "extremist religious 'brain trust', operating behind the scenes and providing its followers with ideological underpinnings for terrorist attacks."
It also stands to reason that this maniac should be indicted as a co-conspirator in the 9-11 attacks. Posted
7:40 PM
by Robert
The "
Fizazi, who has called Usama bin Ladin a "
Fizazi is also linked to Frenchman Jamal Zougam, one of the prime suspects accused of plotting the Madrid train bombings on March 11, 2004. Spanish police tapped a phone call Zougam made in August 2001 in which he was overheard saying that he had met and offered financial aid to Fizazi. 
