U.S. Aides Report Evidence Tying Al Qaeda to Attacks
By DOUGLAS JEHL
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The raid on the safe house in Baghdad used by associates of Mr. Zarqawi was said by one American official to have provided valuable new evidence. The items seized included a compact disc that contained the 17-page proposal to senior leaders of Al Qaeda as well as a seven-pound block of cyanide salt, which the officials said could have spread cyanide gas within an enclosed area.
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In the period before the war, Bush administration officials argued that Mr. Zarqawi constituted the main link between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein's government. At the United Nations in February, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell accused Iraq of harboring "a deadly terrorist network" headed by Mr. Zarqawi, whom he called "an associate and collaborator of Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda lieutenants."
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WASHINGTON, Feb. 9 — Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian suspected of ties to Al Qaeda, is now thought likely to have played a role in at least three major car-bomb attacks in Iraq that have killed well over 100 people in the last six months, according to senior American officials.
Intelligence information, including some gathered in recent weeks, has provided "mounting evidence" to suggest that Mr. Zarqawi was involved in the bombings, including the attacks in August on a Shiite mosque in Najaf and the United Nations headquarters in Baghdad, and the attack in November on an Italian police headquarters.
One official cautioned that the evidence stopped short of firm proof about involvement by Mr. Zarqawi. But the official said the intelligence had added significantly to concern about Mr. Zarqawi, who one official said was now "really viewed as the most adept terrorist operative in Iraq, in terms of foreigners planning terrorist activities."
The indication that Mr. Zarqawi played a role in the attacks adds evidence that he has been active in Iraq since the American invasion in March. An American official said Mr. Zarqawi had been "in and out" of Iraq since March, but "at last report" was operating inside Iraq. One of Mr. Zarqawi's top lieutenants, Hassan Ghul, a Pakistani, was arrested by Americans near the Iranian border last month, and has been interrogated by American military and intelligence officials.
The American officials who described Mr. Zarqawi's suspected role would do so only on condition of anonymity, and they declined to discuss the nature of the information pointing to a role by Mr. Zarqawi in the bombings. But the officials included some who have been skeptical in the past of the idea that foreign militants were playing a major role in the violence in Iraq.
"The fact that we got Hassan Ghul is new intelligence information," one senior American official said. "The fact that Zarqawi is a bad guy is something we've been saying for a long time, but we're learning more about him."
In a raid on a safe house in Baghdad on Jan. 23, American officials found an electronic copy of a document believed to have been written by Mr. Zarqawi. That document was a detailed proposal asking senior leaders of Al Qaeda for help in waging a "sectarian war" against Shiites in Iraq in the next six months. Parts of it were made available to The New York Times.
The writer of that document indicated that he had directed about 25 suicide bombings inside Iraq, "some of them against Shiites and their leaders, the Americans and their military, and the police, the military and the coalition forces." A senior United States intelligence official in Washington said Sunday that he knew of "no reason to believe the letter is bogus in any way."
In the period before the war, Bush administration officials argued that Mr. Zarqawi constituted the main link between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein's government. At the United Nations in February, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell accused Iraq of harboring "a deadly terrorist network" headed by Mr. Zarqawi, whom he called "an associate and collaborator of Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda lieutenants."
At that time, Mr. Zarqawi was believed by American officials to be in the mountains near Iran with Ansar al-Islam, a group linked to Al Qaeda that is suspected of mounting attacks against Americans in Iraq. But little evidence has emerged to support the allegation of a prewar Qaeda connection in Iraq, and Mr. Powell conceded last month that the United States had found no "smoking gun" linking Mr. Hussein's government with Al Qaeda.
The largest of the three attacks that American officials now say may be linked to Mr. Zarqawi was the Aug. 29 explosion outside a mosque in Najaf, a city holy to Shiite Muslims, which killed more than 85 people, including Ayatollah Muhammad Baqr al-Hakim, one of Iraq's most important Shiite leaders.
The raid on the safe house in Baghdad used by associates of Mr. Zarqawi was said by one American official to have provided valuable new evidence. The items seized included a compact disc that contained the 17-page proposal to senior leaders of Al Qaeda as well as a seven-pound block of cyanide salt, which the officials said could have spread cyanide gas within an enclosed area.
"It's likely that he was involved in at least the three bombings," an American official said of Mr. Zarqawi. The car bomb attacks were three of the most deadly in Iraq since the American invasion last March. Besides the Najaf attack, they included the Aug. 19 bombing of the United Nations headquarters, which killed 23 people, including Sergio Vieira de Mello, the top United Nations envoy in Iraq; and the Nov. 12 attack on the headquarters of Italy's paramilitary police in Nasiriya, which killed more than 30 people, including 19 Italians.
Last fall, American military, intelligence and law enforcement officials said they did not know whether the August bombings were part of a coordinated campaign. At the time, they said they were wrestling with several competing theories about who might be behind them, including the possibility that they were carried out by former members of the Iraqi military or paramilitary forces.
Investigators said at the time that they had not seen a common signature in the bombings, but that the attack at the United Nations headquarters and another on the Jordanian Embassy had used vehicles packed with explosives drawn from old Iraqi military stocks. American officials have not said publicly what kinds of explosives were used in the attacks in Najaf and Nasiriya.
On Monday, senior American officials were careful to describe Mr. Zarqawi as "an associate" of Al Qaeda rather than a member. American military officials say that at least 90 percent of the attacks on United States troops are thought to have been carried out by Iraqi Sunnis opposed to the occupation.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/10/po...partner=GOOGLE