Airport handling cultural baggage

PARIS — The list looks like a typical roster of suspected Islamic extremists.

One man had regular contact with a close associate of the “shoe bomber” who tried to blow up a jet flying to Miami from Charles de Gaulle International Airport here. Others are accused of undergoing terrorist training overseas or associating with a North African network involved in bomb plots in Europe. Many allegedly attended sermons by radical clerics.

But this is no ordinary group of suspected radicals. They all work at De Gaulle, the second-busiest airport in Europe and seventh-busiest in the world.

Until authorities revoked their security badges recently, the 72 workers had access to restricted zones and often to passenger cabins and cargo holds. The group includes security screeners, baggage handlers, maintenance workers and employees of freight companies such as FedEx.

The suspicions are based on intelligence culled from files of anti-terrorism agencies. The workers have been barred from the job site but have not been charged with crimes. The case against them is based on information that falls into a gray area between raw intelligence and legal evidence.

The world’s airports, including those in the United States, are perennial targets of thieves and smugglers. But demographics make the workforce of European airports more vulnerable to Islamic extremism.

“In most airports you have tens of thousands of people who have access to secure areas and thousands of people who have access to planes to clean or load them,” said Christophe Chaboud, chief of a police anti-terrorism unit. “You can imagine using them to smuggle aboard explosives or weapons. Who is vulnerable to being recruited for such a plot? People who frequent radical environments. That doesn’t mean they are terrorists, but that they are vulnerable.”

The Al Qaeda terrorist network’s obsession with the aviation industry, demonstrated by the Sept. 11 plot and a failed precursor in Asia, was reiterated in August by the alleged London plot to blow up U.S.-bound planes. Authorities responded with limits on carry-on items.

But terrorists are always looking for new angles, Chaboud said. In Germany, authorities announced in late November that they had broken up a suspected plot to use an airport employee to plant a bomb on a plane belonging to Israel’s El Al airline.

Airports must maintain stringent standards for their personnel, said Chaboud, who led the inquiry on the workers here.

“You have to choose,” he said. “Either you worship at a radical mosque, you have contacts with radicals, or you work at the airport. You can’t do both.”

Charles de Gaulle has about 85,000 employees, about one-fifth of them Muslim. The airport northeast of the capital is a top employer in an expanse of slums with high concentrations of immigrants, poverty and crime. Many airport employees live in grim housing projects that were in the spotlight during riots last year and are home to a tangle of extremist, criminal and ethnic networks.

Anti-terrorism officials acknowledge wrestling with ambiguities when monitoring extremism that falls short of lawbreaking.

“The risks are often going to be subjective,” said Supt. Alain Grignard of the Belgian Federal Police, a respected expert on Islam. “You can’t ban someone from a job just because of their religion.”

Labor unions and civil rights advocates accuse the French government of doing just that.

Election approaching

With the French presidential election approaching, critics say that Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, who is a candidate, led a witch hunt in response to a book in which far-right presidential hopeful Philippe de Villiers said there were Islamic extremists at De Gaulle.

“These men are hostages to electoral excess and political debate,” said Eric Moutet, a union lawyer.

Most of the 72 workers are Muslims, but a few are accused of having ties to groups such as the Tamil Tigers, the Sri Lankan rebel group. Nine of them have gone to court, and four have succeeded in getting their security badges back. Some intelligence reports had inaccurate information about name spellings, license numbers and relatives, let alone supposed militant activity, lawyers asserted.

A former French anti-terrorism official who investigated airport employees said many are Salafists, hard-core fundamentalists who aspire to return to the religious practices of the time of the prophet Muhammad. Many Salafists are nonviolent, but their ideology spawned Al Qaeda and allied movements.

“A lot of these guys are 25 to 35 years old,” said the former anti-terrorism official. “They traveled a while ago to study at madrasas [religious schools] in countries such as Yemen, where religious indoctrination often ended up having a paramilitary training component.”

Associates of terrorists

Investigators have not proved that the men attended terrorist training camps, but find it troubling that they studied at Koranic schools in countries with virulent militant movements. Some workers belong to Tablighi Jamaat, a missionary sect that organized their trips. Although Tablighis shun politics and violence, investigators say, the group has produced a number of terrorists.

One employee had repeated contact with a close associate of convicted “shoe bomber” Richard C. Reid. The associate was a Pakistani member of a network that provided logistical support here for Reid’s plot in late 2001, Chaboud said.

Two other men are suspected of being associates of an Algerian network that plotted to bomb the Paris subway, Orly airport and the headquarters of the DST counter-terrorism service last year, Chaboud said.

Investigators also detected travel by airport employees to Afghanistan before the Sept. 11 attacks, when Al Qaeda’s training camps still were operating there. Chaboud said those workers were no longer at the airport.

Grignard, the Belgian expert, has long worried that extremists could target airport workers because of the combination of their low socioeconomic status and high-security jobs.

“The heart of the problem is that the worst jobs are held by the poorest workers, who are often immigrants and Muslims,” he said. “It’s logical. If I had a terrorist network, I would try to recruit workers at the airport, or infiltrate people into the airport.”

A Brussels cell dismantled in late 2001 after allegedly plotting to bomb the U.S. Embassy in Paris had associates working in maintenance and security at the Brussels airport, Grignard said.

That airport has had at least three incidents of anti-Semitism by employees. In 2001, an employee of Arab origin defaced baggage from an El Al flight with swastikas and graffiti declaring “Death to Jews.” The Israeli airline also was the target in the German case, in which authorities arrested six people and accused them of trying to bribe an airport employee.

In London, suspects arrested in the alleged airplane bomb plot in August included a worker at Heathrow Airport. He was released without charge.

Despite those cases, critics say the Paris crackdown is overkill.

Feeling like a scapegoat

Mohammed Abdellah Tou, a baggage handler who contested his suspension in court, sees himself as a scapegoat.

“France doesn’t like Islam,” Tou said in an interview in the parking lot of a courthouse in the industrial suburb of Bobigny. “They have demonized us.”

A French citizen who retains a slight accent of his native Algeria, Tou, 31, is compact and burly. He has worked for eight years for a baggage company and makes about $1,700 a month. He wore the full beard of a devout Muslim and a red jacket with the insignia of the Manchester United soccer team.

“In our private lives, we who work at the airport, we are wiretapped, we are followed,” he said. “When I talk on the phone, all I talk about is soccer. I’m not a danger, so I talk freely.”

Police detained him briefly in 1998 along with a neighbor who is prominent in a Pakistani extremist group. Authorities also allege that Tou attended a Salafist mosque, worshiped at clandestine prayer halls in airport locker rooms and had ties to convicted stickup men as well as baggage handlers arrested on suspicion of theft last year.

His lawyer argued that Tou did not know about his neighbor’s militant activity and was not implicated in crimes. As for the locker room prayer areas, lawyers and intelligence officials say some were approved by supervisors.

Twice as many employees

The workforce at De Gaulle has doubled in a decade, increasing the presence of private subcontractors and short-term workers, according to the former French anti-terrorism official. About half the 20,000 employees who provide security, load luggage and cargo, and clean and supply planes are of North African backgrounds, he said.

“As the airport authority has progressively subcontracted, they have started to lose control,” the former official said. “Ethnic networks recruit in their hometowns in Morocco. And sometimes this results in illegal immigrants being hired, thefts, other security problems.”

The problems usually do not rise to the level of terrorism. Authorities insist that the airport remains well protected and that the vast majority of its Muslim workers are law-abiding. But investigators expend great effort tracking a small minority.

“You are not just screening passengers, you have to watch your own people,” Grignard said. “There is all this attention now on carry-on liquids. But there are still other vulnerabilities, like the luggage going into the cargo hold, like the workforce.

“It’s the last line of defense.”

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Times staff writer Achrene Sicakyuz contributed to this report.