Canadian anti-terrorism police have arrested a man suspected of helping Al Qaeda-linked militants who were planning to bomb the U.S. Embassy in Paris last year.
Adel Tobbichi, 34, was arrested Friday in Montreal as the result of an extradition request from the Netherlands, Royal Canadian Mounted Police Constable Richard Huard said. Police also searched his Montreal home.
Tobbichi, of Algerian origin, is alleged by Dutch police to have altered passports and other documents and provided them to militants planning to bomb the embassy. Huard said officials were unsure if he was a Canadian citizen.
Dutch authorities already are holding two French citizens they believe were involved in the foiled attack on the building near the Champs Elysees.
Prosecutors in Rotterdam have said they have tapes of wiretaps linking the pair, Jerome Courtailler and Mohammed Berkous, both 27, to the suspected suicide bomber, Nizar Trabelsi, who is under arrest in Belgium.
Courtailler and Berkous were arrested in the port city two days after the Sept. 11 attacks in the United States.
The tapes prove that Courtailler and Berkous had spoken to Trabelsi about arranging passports and a safe house for him in the Netherlands, Dutch prosecutor Theo D’Anjou said earlier this month.
The suspected leader in the plot, 36-year-old Djamel Beghal, was extradited to France in October from the United Arab Emirates after he told police there he had helped plan the bombing. After his arrest last July in the United Arab Emirates on a passport violation, he spilled to French authorities details of the plot.
Beghal, a Frenchman of Algerian origin, admitted he met a top aide to Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden at his Afghan headquarters and agreed to arrange the attack.
Another man, Kamel Daoudi, a 27-year-old Algerian computer expert whose alleged role was to maintain the group’s contact with Al Qaeda over the Internet, was arrested in England in late September and also is being held in France.
Tobbichi will likely appear in court Saturday for an arraignment, Huard said.
Huard said there was no information yet connecting Tobbichi with the Montreal-based terrorist cell that helped Algerian Ahmed Ressam in a plot to bomb Los Angeles International Airport on New Year’s Eve 2000. Ressam was arrested when he tried to enter the U.S. from Canada and was later convicted.
