Spain: Recruitment, funding for AQIM

Spain: Recruitment, funding for AQIM


Via T&P (via El País)


Last reports sent to Spanish Government by the National Inteligence Center (CNI), the General Police and Civil Guard Information Office point out that Spain is a "recruitment ground" and "constant source of funding" of AQIM (Al-Qaeda for an Islamic Maghreb). There are around 30 open investigations now in Spain about Islamist terrorism which have this group as their target.


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"It's very difficult to know how much money they have raised here, but in the last years, they have received from Spain a million euros at least", according to an agent from the General Information Office. Stealing is not the only way to fund the movement: there are also donations made to continue the jihad in Africa using the net of halal meat butchers and the zakat (alms) from some radical mosques. A joint group of Spanish and French Judges and Prosecutors, studies the phenomenon of funding channels for AQIM. "The money is send without any stops. We are an inexhaustible source, but this is very difficult to fight because most of it moves through hawala (a payment system held outside the traditional finance system)" according to one member of the equipment.


Salafists which fund and recruit for the Sahel are all over Spain. Since 11S, the moment when the police was awakened and began carrying on "preventive" detentions, an important number of their militants have been recruited in Andalucía, Ceuta y Melilla, Basque Country, Navarra, Aragón, Madrid and Catalonia. Some judges from National Court, like Baltasar Garzón, have questioned in their offices hundreds of their militants and are familiar with their practices and targets.


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The pledge to Bin Laden and this call for the union of the Mujahideens have achieved what looked like impossible: all the Jihadist groups from the north of Africa are united, a time bomb of unknown and unforseeable differences. So, the salafists from the GSPC bind today to the Moroccan Islamic Fighter Group (GICM), the Lybian Islamic Fighter Group, the Tunisian movements and other satellites, according to the CNI's analysts. In 2007, Islam's lion (Osama bin Laden) let the GSPC Argelian terrorists to be renamed as "Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb", the group that had kidnapped the three Spanbish volunteers. "This blessing has turned them into a model in the north of Africa, so a lot of people would like to be recruited by them. Dozens of them have already done that from Spain", according to UC2's Chief, the Civil Guard's unit which investigates on Islamist terrorism. A nightmare for the European intelligence services, specially for Spain and France, as they fear that Salafists will train their men on the desert and then order them to strike on European targets.


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