Glimpses of a Shadowy World in Pakistan - New York Times
Glimpses of a Shadowy World in Pakistan
STUTTGART, Germany, Sept. 17 Aleem Nasir, a 45-year-old German citizen who was held for two months this summer in Pakistan and interrogated by Pakistani and Western agents about terrorism-related activities, concedes that they have their right to be worried about me.
He has been on a German watch list since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, when he was reported to have made comments threatening more terrorist strikes. He acknowledges associating with people viewed by the authorities as militants. And he said his work in the semiprecious gem trade occasionally took him to the tribal areas of Pakistan where Al Qaeda is said to have regrouped.
On his recent trip there, he suffered a nasty burn on his right arm, which he said was a result of a fireworks mishap at a friends wedding. But a German court order said that Mr. Nasir was burned when a bomb he was learning to build at a Qaeda training camp in the tribal areas of Pakistan ignited prematurely, and that he confessed to this while in detention.
Mr. Nasir denies any Qaeda ties and said he confessed while being beaten by Pakistani agents. He was released last month by the Pakistani Supreme Court, which ruled that he had been held too long without being charged, and is now back home where he is under investigation by German officials.
At a time of growing concern about terror training under way in the tribal areas of Pakistan, Mr. Nasirs experience, pieced together from government documents and interviews with him and intelligence officials, offers a view of the traffic into that region and the attempt by the authorities to monitor it.
The concern about the training, particularly among Western intelligence officials, was underscored this month when officials said that suspects in suspected bombing plots in Germany and Denmark had attended the camps. Officials said the suspects were identified partly through electronic monitoring of that area of Pakistan by the United States.
Mr. Nasirs profile made him a prime catch for the intelligence dragnet around the camps, and his movements set off alarm bells in three capitals Islamabad, Pakistan, Washington and Berlin. Mr. Nasir, a trained mechanical engineer who moved to Germany from Pakistan in 1987 and married a German woman, has been on a German watch list since co-workers at an energy research institute reported that right after the Sept. 11 attacks he predicted terrorist strikes in Germany comments that Mr. Nasir said were exaggerated.
Months later, he was fined after threatening a police officer who he said derided the Prophet Muhammad. If you were in Pakistan, I might kill you if you are abusing the prophet, Mr. Nasir said he told the officer.
Among his friends is an imam at a Bavarian mosque, now closed, whose members included the suspected leader of the German car bomb plot disrupted in early September. Mr. Nasir denies any connection to terrorist groups, but he condones violent attacks against American troops in Iraq. The enemy should leave our territories, he said.
Mr. Nasir said that since losing his engineering job about five years ago, he had been trading semiprecious stones, which has taken takes him around Europe and to the tribal areas of Pakistan, where he said he looked for bargains.
The German authorities see his trips there differently. An Aug. 1, German court order authorizing a police search, citing information from the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence agency, or ISI, said there was sufficient evidence that he supported Al Qaeda by the financial payments, by the recruitment of fighters, by the handing over of field glasses and night-vision glasses, as well as by the idea of fighting for Al Qaeda by himself.
Mr. Nasir was detained as he prepared to fly home from Lahore, Pakistan, on June 18, after having spent 10 days in the tribal areas. We know you were there, Mr. Nasir said he was told the first day by a Pakistani intelligence officer. We know everything about you.
The agents even knew he had brought a pair of $180 night-vision goggles into the country. He said he had an explanation: he brought them for a friend in the tribal area of North Waziristan who has many sheep, goats and cows. He was having with him a very bad instrument, you know, to watch the animals and so I said, If you want, I can bring you some better, Mr. Nasir said.
Then Western intelligence agents, who he said he believes were American and British, took over the questioning, he said, and pressed him to divulge all that he knew about militant plots. Are you planning any attacks in the United States? he said they asked. Are you familiar with American military installations in Japan and South Korea? How were you going to use the bomb-making chemicals that were found in your house? He said he used the chemicals to clean gems.
In daily sessions lasting as long as seven hours, he said, Western officials questioned him, while a Pakistani interrogator sat off to the side, sometimes sleeping. The Americans are very intelligent, he said. They let you speak, and dont tell you anything. Only the Pakistanis were crude, saying things like, Do you make bombs?
Some of the questions were focused on his travels to Pakistans tribal areas, particularly South Waziristan and North Waziristan, he said, and they asked about a man named Sheik Said, whom they identified as the No. 3 leader in the training camps, and about whether he visited the compound run by a man named Abu Ubayda al-Missri, who has been identified as a camp leader. They asked how he communicated with his family in Germany. They said there are Internet cafes, and asked why I didnt send e-mails from them, he said.
But mostly, he said, the Americans focused on whom he knew, where he had traveled in Europe, and where he planned to go. He ticked off the questions he was asked: Were you in Hamburg? Were you in Frankfurt? Do you know there is an American compound in Hanau? Did you know there are some people wanting to attack Americans? They asked me about discothèques.
Mr. Nasir said he was first beaten when he was detained. He said he was blindfolded and hooded and driven to a nearby police station where a Pakistani agent questioned him for just 15 minutes before he brought out a hard rubber paddle and a bamboo stick. Mr. Nasir said the man began striking him with the paddle. Three blows were enough to break him, he said, and he told the man he had trained in the Qaeda camps. You say everything they want, he said. I could not bear any more.
He said Pakistani officers beat him occasionally over the next two months but never in the presence of Westerners. He said that when they hit him, it was with restraint, usually only three times a session as if they had been told that was all they should do.
German and American officials declined to comment on Mr. Nasirs case or his allegations.
At one point, he said, Western agents showed him surveillance photographs of a dozen men, including Fritz Martin Gelowicz, who was arrested in Germany in early September in the suspected car-bombing plot and who officials say received training in the Pakistan camps.
Mr. Nasir said he had never met Mr. Gelowicz, although they have a connection through an imam at a mosque in Neu-Ulm, Germany, which Mr. Gelowicz attended until German authorities closed it in 2005 for promoting extremist views. Mr. Nasir said he spent as many as two evenings a week with the imam, Dr. Yehia Yousif, who has since fled to Saudi Arabia.
Concern that Al Qaeda has established new training camps in Waziristan has heightened since 2005 when officials learned that the leader of the deadly subway and bus attacks in London had trained in Pakistan. A man accused of plotting to blow up a PATH train as it crossed under the Hudson River was arrested in April 2006 as he was heading from Beirut, Lebanon, to Pakistan for explosives training, according to court records and interviews with Lebanese officials.
Then, last summer, the authorities suspected a link between activity in Pakistan and a disrupted plot to bomb trans-Atlantic flights. That caused the United States to take notice of a revived Al Qaeda, said Bruce Hoffman of Georgetown University, who has studied terrorism for three decades. An American counterterrorism official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the investigation, said, If you see people moving in and out these training camps, its self-evident that governments would be engaged in dealing with them, confirming a multinational effort to monitor the tribal areas.
Mr. Nasir said that during his travels there he heard frequent gunfire and explosions that he presumed were militant exercises, and that he also saw Arab men on the streets whom he presumed were Qaeda operatives. He said he neither met the men nor saw any training camps. While in the regional capital of Wana, in South Waziristan, he said he did meet another man from Germany who is suspected of terrorism-related activities.
After two months in detention, Mr. Nasir benefited from the recent political tension in Pakistan between the president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, and the Supreme Court. The court has sided with human rights advocates in forcing the Inter-Services Intelligence agency to release about 60 terrorism suspects who were being held without charge.
Mr. Nasir said he was being questioned one moment, and the next he was being whisked to the Supreme Court, where the chief justice, Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, ordered him freed.
The Bush administration has pressed General Musharraf to do more in pursuing people suspected of being militants in the tribal areas. But General Musharraf is now facing critics who say the ISI has rounded up innocent people along with legitimate suspects and subverted the countrys judicial system.
Human rights advocates say that they have identified as many as 250 people they say are being held by the ISI as terrorism suspects, and that they will fight for their release.
In Germany, Mr. Nasir said he was one of those innocent people, and his lawyer, Manfred Gnjidic, said he was going to contest the German investigation of his client. I wouldnt have had a problem if German authorities would have asked my client for a questioning here in Germany, he said. But now they start using ways that are totally against the Constitution of Germany.
But when Mr. Nasir arrived back in Germany on Aug. 25, it was clear the German investigation was in full swing. His home had been thoroughly searched in his absence, and the police presented him with a search warrant allowing them take samples of his blood and the skin on his burned arm.
They then let him go home to greet his wife.
