Belgium. Who'da thunk it

The International Herald Tribune has a story by Steven Erlanger about the latest in terrorism:

The Belgian police arrested 14 people suspected of terrorist links in raids Thursday, including one man thought to have been planning a suicide attack who had "said goodbye to his loved ones", said the federal prosecutor in Brussels, Johan Delmulle. Although the possible target was not clear, the arrests came on a day when European Union leaders began a two-day summit meeting in Brussels. "We don't know where the suicide attack was to take place," Delmulle said. "It could have been an operation in Pakistan or Afghanistan, but it can't be ruled out that Belgium or Europe could have been the target."
Given the summit meeting, which marks the effective end of the French presidency of the European Union, Delmulle said the Belgian authorities felt they had "no choice but to take action today." Lieve Pellens, a spokeswoman for the federal prosecutor's office, said in an interview by telephone that those arrested included Malika el-Aroud, 49, who calls herself a female warrior for al-Qaeda and writes jihadist screeds on the Internet under the name Oum Obeyda. Aroud's husband, Moez Garsalloui, was also believed to have been arrested, said Claude Moniquet, chairman of the European Strategic Intelligence & Security Center, a research organization in Brussels. Garsalloui was released in July of 2007 after serving three weeks for promoting violence and then disappeared. Belgian officials said he fled to Pakistan and Afghanistan, and Moniquet said that Garsalloui was one of the three people arrested whom prosecutors said had recently returned from training camps along the Pakistani-Afghan border. A fourth suspect was tracked to South Asia but has not yet returned, the officials said.
Pellens said in the interview that she believed the cases against the fourteen arrested were strong, based on a year of investigation, surveillance, and wiretapping carried out by a team of 80 police officers. She described Aroud, who has been arrested before and released, as "a very important and serious lady", and said the prosecutor "will try to prove in court that she's important, a leader, who takes decisions and raises money". The case, Pellens said, is about terrorism but also about "grand theft and robbery as a way to raise money for the group". She said that "the investigation was complex and intense, and there were times when all the wiretapping chambers were occupied with anti-terrorism guys working this case". The police carried out sixteen raids in Brussels and one in the eastern city of Liège. The timing of the arrests was forced by the summit meeting, the prosecutor's office said, and came after threats against Belgium contained in a video sent to Belgian and Dutch television networks at the end of November. Faced with raising the threat level and disrupting the summit meeting or making the arrests a little early, Pellens said, the decision was made to make the arrests.
A statement from the prosecutor's office said that several of those arrested were suspected of ties to al-Qaeda, and that there are direct contacts between the group around the suspect 'MG' - the initials of Garsalloui - "and important people of the organization al-Qaeda".
The suicide farewell of one of the suspects was captured through wiretaps, Pellens said, who added that the suspect had changed considerably after his return from Afghanistan. "He became the Arnold Schwarzenegger of the group," she said.
A year ago, the Belgians arrested about a dozen people when the United States provided them with information that an attack in Brussels was imminent, Pellens said. Moniquet said that the pressure from Washington was so strong that the arrests were made before strong cases could be made against the suspects, and all were released the next day. The target was believed to have been an American installation. To justify the arrests a year ago, the Belgian authorities tied them to an effort to break Nizar Trabelsi out of jail, even though evidence for such a plot was at least six months old at the time, Belgian officials said. Trabelsi, a former soccer player and member of al-Qaeda, has been jailed in Belgium since 2001 for his alleged involvement in a plot to blow up a NATO installation in Belgium. He was also alleged to be involved in an al-Qaeda plot to blow up the American Embassy in Paris, the prosecutor's office said. He was sentenced in June of 2004 to ten years in prison at a trial where he pledged his allegiance to Osama bin Laden, whom he had met in Afghanistan. Washington has filed an extradition request for Trabelsi, who has appealed against the extradition. Those arrested Thursday had ties to Trabelsi and his wife, Belgian officials say. Moniquet, noting that some of those arrested were returning from Afghanistan, said he is assuming that their target "was in Europe, maybe in Belgium or France."

Rico says the phrase 'jihadist screeds' makes him, in the words of Joseph Stalin, "reach for his revolver"...