Web of Jihad Draws In an Immigrant Family in France

By CRAIG S. SMITH

NY Times
Published: July 31, 2004

When Chellali Benchellali moved to France 41 years ago his path seemed clear enough. Escaping the misery of his native Algeria, he hoped to get a job, marry, raise a family and blend into the French melting pot.

He got part way there. But for the last six months Mr. Benchellali has been in a high-security French prison along with his wife and two of his sons, all accused of helping to plot a chemical attack in the style of Al Qaeda in Europe. A third son has just been released from the American detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, one of four Frenchmen handed over to the French authorities this week.

The family's journey from yearning immigrants to alleged Islamic militants - accused of harboring a makeshift laboratory in their suburban Lyon apartment, where one son was said to have been trying to make biological and chemical bombs - is an extreme but still emblematic manifestation of a quiet crisis spreading through Europe's growing Arab underclass.

Such dramatic deviations are rare, but they point to a dangerous ideological drift in many of the Continent's immigrant neighborhoods, a drift that is stigmatizing Muslims, alarming antiterrorism officials and shaping government policies.

The story recounted here has been pieced together from transcripts of interrogations of family members and their associates, as well as interviews with the Benchellali daughters, lawyers and friends.

Mr. Benchellali, 59, arrived in France in 1963 and found a job as a window washer in the suburbs of Lyon. In 1972, he married a young Algerian woman named Hafsa. Together they had six children, all born French.

The family was allotted an apartment in the Minguettes housing project, built to accommodate the influx of North African workers imported to staff the nearby chemical plant and other factories.

But the 1960's economic boom ended, and as Mr. Benchellali's finances faltered his faith increased, neighbors say. He brought his wife, a nonpracticing Muslim, to religion. She read stories of the prophet Muhammad to her children and taught them to pray, and to fast during the holy month of Ramadan.

Mr. Benchellali eventually lost his job because of a shoulder injury, and the family now lives on his disability payments of about 1,000 euros a month - about $1,200 at current exchange rates.

The same arc, only less acute, has been followed by millions of other North African immigrants in France. More than a third of the working-age adults in the Benchellalis' town of Vénissieux are unemployed, and the level of joblessness is even higher among those of Arab descent, who make up more than half the town.

The suburban crescent east and south of Lyon between the towns of Vaux-en-Velin and Vénissieux has long been a vortex of French Arab activism.

Vénissieux's mayor, André Gerin, said there was a "qualitative change" in the town after the Persian Gulf war of 1991, which appalled many devout Muslims because of the presence of American troops on Saudi soil and helped trigger Osama bin Laden's jihad against the West.

At the time, Mr. Benchellali helped organize a prayer room in one of the Minguettes' towers and battled with the local school system when it forbade his daughters to attend classes with their heads covered.

In 1993, Mr. Benchellali began raising money and traveling to Bosnia to distribute food and clothing to besieged Muslims. On his fifth trip there, Croatian soldiers seized him and two other men from Vénissieux and held them in brutal conditions for five months.

He came back with even stronger religious convictions and began preaching in the ground-floor activity room of his apartment block. The room soon became known as the Abu Bakr mosque. His sermons took on an increasingly radical tone.

Menad, the oldest boy, received a certificate in electronics from a vocational high school in 1991. By all accounts he was dominated by his father and took a job washing windows for the same industrial cleaning company. His father's Bosnian ordeal and growing radicalization clearly had an impact on him, according to his mother and friends in the neighborhood.

By the mid-1990's, with a civil war in full swing in Algeria, supporters of the violent Armed Islamic Group carried the battle to the Continent. The police say the Abu Bakr mosque became an occasional halfway house for members of the group passing through France.

Menad had quit his job by then and was fired from a string of others. In 1995, he left for Syria to study Arabic and the Koran. He spent several months in Sudan, where Al Qaeda's network was then coalescing.

He returned to Vénissieux in 1996 a bearded fundamentalist. Once home, two events served to send him into the shadowy world of jihad, according to his mother and friends interviewed in Vénissieux.

First, his father took a second wife, illegal in France but permitted by Islam. The marriage caused a rift between Mr. Benchellali and his children, particularly Menad. Then Menad's own marriage, to the daughter of one of the men with whom Mr. Benchellali had been imprisoned in Bosnia, fell apart.

"It was at this time that he became more radical," Mrs. Benchellali told the police. His brother Hafed told investigators, "I think we need to educate people, and in that way we can install the Shariah," speaking of the Islamic legal code. "But Menad believes it should be done by force."

Soon the brothers had drifted into the fringe of an underground radical Islamic network, trading in false travel documents. Menad led Hafed into increasingly serious crimes, culminating in the theft of payrolls where he worked.

Mrs. Benchellali, Hafed, and a close friend later implicated in his terrorist schemes have all told investigators that Menad went in 1998 or 1999 to Afghanistan, where he spent a year or more in a Qaeda training camp. According to the police, Menad persuaded his youngest brother, Mourad, a high school dropout, to go with Nizar Sassi, a neighborhood friend, to Afghanistan for Qaeda training in 2001.

Menad left a few days later for the Pankisi Gorge in the republic of Georgia, hoping to go to Chechnya to fight in the Muslim rebellion there. He was unable to get across the border but stayed anyway. He has admitted to training in explosives and small arms while there.

Hafed sent a total of about $9,000 to Menad through Aslanbek Bagakhashvili, whom French antiterrorism officials identify as an associate of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, widely viewed as the top Qaeda operative in Iraq today. Menad says he lived with Mr. Bagakhashvili in Georgia.

Meanwhile, American forces picked up Mourad and Nizar, either in Afghanistan or along the Pakistani border. The first their families knew of their fate was when they received a call from the International Committee of the Red Cross.

In one letter from Guantánamo Bay, Nizar wrote, "A definition of this place: one doesn't have the right to have rights." In another, a line left unblackened by military censors reads: "Three times a week they give me bizarre drugs. The situation is very difficult."

Menad left Georgia in December 2001, for Spain, where he bought a chemistry catalog, intending, he told investigators, to make toxic products "in case I became involved in jihad." Then he shuttled between Vénissieux and Paris, where investigators say a Chechen-trained terrorist cell was forming.

During his time in Vénissieux, he borrowed his mother's coffee pot and kitchen scale to set up a makeshift laboratory in her sewing room. He rarely left the apartment, sending his sister Anissa to buy supplies, including glycerin - an ingredient for some explosives - and acetone.

Mrs. Benchellali has told investigators of strong fumes coming from the room and white powder left to dry on her ironing board.

It is not clear what Menad was mixing. In an early interrogation without his lawyer present, Hafed told investigators that Menad had taken a course in how to make ricin - a powerful organic poison - while in Afghanistan. "Menad told me of poisons mortal to the simple touch," Hafed said.

A Vénissieux neighbor who had accompanied Menad to Georgia also told investigators that Menad had trained in ricin production while in Afghanistan and that he had been trying "to make chemical or bacteriological products to commit an attack," according to a transcript of the interrogation.

Mrs. Benchellali, in her early interrogations, told investigators, "I knew well that it was to make chemical bombs or something like that, but I didn't know the details."

Later, under advice from their lawyers, Mrs. Benchellali and Hafed retracted their statements, and though Menad has admitted to such a desire, he denies having received any formal chemical or bacteriological training in Chechnya or Afghanistan and says he was only working on conventional explosives.

On Dec. 16 the police arrested three of Menad's Chechen-trained associates at an apartment outside Paris. There the police found a chemical and biological weapons protection suit, elements of a remote detonator and components that they suspected were to have been made into a bomb.

Menad panicked when he learned of the arrests and got rid of a bag containing a computer diskette and flasks of liquid before rushing back to Paris. He was arrested a few days later in a two-room ground-floor apartment of an abandoned building in Romainville, another immigrant suburb, northeast of Paris. Among his possessions was a list of 11 chemicals, as well as bottles of sulfuric acid, hydrogen peroxide and glycerin.

One of the men arrested with Menad said the group had been planning to attack the Russian Embassy in Paris with "a chemical bomb." But expert analysis has found that neither the list nor the chemicals found in either raid were sufficient to make a bomb, let alone a chemical or biological weapon. Contrary to some reports, no traces of ricin were found.

Menad has denied that any specific plot was in place and said he had simply been honing his skills in preparation for jihad. "I am ready to sacrifice myself in a just and necessary war for the liberation of an Islamic land attacked by any enemy," he told investigators.

The police have found links between both Menad and Hafed and suspected terrorist cells in Spain and London, including one that succeeded in producing an undetermined quantity of ricin. In January of this year, the police arrested Hafed along with his father, mother and three other people from the neighborhood on charges that they had been supporting Menad in his terrorist activities.

Sitting recently in the family's small parlor where Menad once slept, his sister Amel defended her brothers. She says she does not believe that the youngest brother, Mourad, intended to do anything more than study the Koran in Afghanistan. "It's impossible that he was fighting," she said. "He doesn't have that character." Nor does she believe that Menad was capable of mounting a sophisticated terrorist attack.

Anissa, who fetched Menad supplies and saw the white powder drying on the ironing board, said she had never asked what he was doing in their mother's sewing room. "I've never been a curious person," she said.