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French Al Qaeda man tells all to interrogators

WASHINGTON: The Advertiser, an Austrialian newspaper, has come out with some startling revelations about an Al Qaeda man, a French national, captured in Australia and now being interrogated by the French.

According to a report published by the newspaper on 18 October, Willie Brigitte, the captured man, has told French investigators of his extraordinary journey from failed butcher to linchpin in an Al Qaeda plan to launch a terror attack on Australia. He has detailed the high-altitude paramilitary training he undertook in a vast camp overlooking the Himalayas in which he and thousands of jihad warriors were schooled in terrorism. He has told of how Osama Bin Laden’s allies have penetrated the Pakistani Army to thwart US efforts to crack terrorist training operations in the remote Pakistani mountain regions that border Afghanistan. A year after the French national was captured in a western Sydney apartment with documents indicating he was planning to launch an attack on Australian targets, his interrogation transcripts are said to have come into the possession of the Australian newspaper.

The transcripts are said to give a rare insight into how the networks of people prepared to join the Islamist jihad against the West function. Brigitte told investigators the camp where he was trained in the use of explosives, small arms and terrorism tactics was a sophisticated three-tiered mountain complex close to the Indo-Pakistani border. He was grouped with foreign recruits, including American and British citizens of Pakistani origin. “There were between 2,000 and 3,000 mujahideens,” Brigitte told French anti-terror judge Jean-Louis Bruguiere. “I remember it was very impressive because we gathered every morning and shouted Allah Akbar. What was more, the site was imposing since one could see the outline of the Himalayas.” The camp was run by Lashkar e Taiba (LET). Brigitte said LET was filled with soldiers from the Pakistan Army who worked to sabotage efforts by the West to fight bin Laden and his allies.

“There was complete complicity between Lashkar e Taiba and the Pakistani Army,” Brigitte said in a secret interrogation in the Paris judicial chambers of Judge Bruguiere on 3 December 2003. “Furthermore, the weapons were provided by the army. The munitions were brought in by night between the first and second levels (of the camp). “There was everything -munitions, arms and food. We had the feeling that these weapons came from the Pakistani Army.

“There were American M16s, French FAMS, Kalashnikovs and Makarovs. All the identification numbers had been removed.” Brigitte said on several occasions he was ordered to remove any evidence of military activity. The camp leaders had been warned that a raid by a coalition of CIA agents and Pakistani soldiers was imminent. “I can remember four raids by the Pakistani Army,” Brigitte said. “They always asked the foreign volunteers, of whom I was one, to clean up the camp and particularly to collect the cartridge cases and cartridges. “There were no more than 15 Pakistani soldiers who came to carry out these checks with the same number of Americans.

“We were told that they were CIA agents who had come to check for the presence of foreign mujahideens.”

Brigitte stayed at the camp for six weeks before returning to Paris early in 2002.

His flatmate in Paris, Ibrahim Keita, said Brigitte had returned under orders to organise a sleeper cell there. “Brigitte did explain to me he had been sent back to France in order to make contact with a certain number of people,” Keita told Judge Bruguiere. “They were individuals who had either already fought or who had taken training in camps like him, as I understood it.” Brigitte was acting under orders from his mentor at the LET camp, known as Sajid Abu Braa, a 30-year-old Pakistan Army soldier in charge of foreign recruits. Abu Braa, who travelled with two personal bodyguards, was a close associate of the camp’s leader, known only as Zakerahmane. In Afghanistan, he was Bin Laden’s right-hand man. Brigitte was arrested at his Sydney flat on 9 October 2003 and officials found maps of Australian nuclear sites, and the Perth headquarters of Australia’s elite SAS unit. He was repatriated to France on October 17, where he remains imprisoned in Paris’s Fleury Merogis Jail. khalid hasan

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