Evidence gathered by Turkish investigators examining the suicide bombings that rocked Istanbul in November highlights the difficulties in combating groups that act on their own initiative and have only loose ties to the Al Qaeda network.
With criminal trials arising from those bombings scheduled to begin later this month, Turkish authorities have acknowledged that the men suspected of planning and carrying out the Istanbul blasts had been under surveillance for as long as five years. During those years, the suspects reportedly traveled from Turkey to Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran.
Authorities say they lacked the hard evidence to arrest the men and prevent the bombings of two synagogues, a bank headquarters and the British Consulate in a five-day period. The blasts killed more than 61 people and injured hundreds more.
“We cannot even say that [the perpetrators] were a militant organization; they were an informal group, just a bunch of men, going to Afghanistan, returning to Turkey,” said Interior Minister Abdulkadir Aksu in Ankara, the capital. “We were suspicious that they were going there for training. That is why we were watching them. But before the bombings, there was no cause for their arrest.”
According to Bekir Aldemir, the prosecutor in charge of the cases at the Istanbul State Security Court, the trials of the 57 suspects are expected to last several months.
Al Qaeda `trademark’
“From the beginning, the bombings had the trademark indications of Al Qaeda,” said Boaz Ganor, director of the International Policy Institute for Counter-Terrorism in Tel Aviv. “Almost any layman would say that these attacks were too complicated for a local organization to do, that they would need to support of a bigger organization.”
A small Turkish radical group, the Great Eastern Islamic Raiders Front, claimed responsibility in a phone call to the state-run Anatolia News Agency hours after the first truck bombs exploded outside two synagogues.
The caller reportedly said the attacks would continue to “prevent the oppression of Muslims.”
Initially, Turkish authorities doubted the Raiders Front had the resources to carry out such sophisticated assaults.
Investigators said they now believe the local group was responsible for the bombings, but that its members had trained in Afghanistan and some had honed their skills battling Russians in the breakaway republic of Chechnya.
Experts said the Istanbul attacks were part of a string of attacks, including in Saudi Arabia, Indonesia and Morocco, thought to have been organized by small groups loosely associated with Al Qaeda and trained at camps still operating in Afghanistan.
The links to the larger Al Qaeda organization began to emerge from the rubble of the Istanbul bomb sites. A DNA trail revealed that the four dead bombers were members of the Turkish group known to have traveled to Afghanistan.
A man who confessed to helping plot the attacks, Feyzi Yitiz, was arrested two weeks after the second wave of bombings when he tried to re-enter Turkey from Iran. Yitiz told Turkish investigators that he and the four suicide bombers had been trained in explosives and martial arts in Afghanistan as recently as 2002 and that they had met with Osama bin Laden.
Identity papers for several Turks were discovered by U.S. troops at an abandoned Al Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan, according to another official involved in the inquiry. Among them were papers for a brother of one of the suicide bombers.
Despite ties to Al Qaeda, the Turks chose their own targets and planned the attacks independently, investigators said.
They said the plotters wanted to attack the air base at Incirlik in southern Turkey where U.S. military aircraft and troops are based, but they abandoned the idea because the site was too well protected.
Aksu, the interior minister, acknowledged that the investigation had a head start because the attackers and suspected accomplices had been under surveillance.
Some diplomats, however, questioned how suspects being watched by security police could have pulled off the complex attacks, which involved stolen trucks and hundreds of pounds of explosives.
“Turkish police had been following these people for months, even years,” said a foreign diplomat in Istanbul. “But because of the country’s recent human-rights reforms, made in an effort to qualify for membership in the European Union, Turkey’s hands were tied with regard to these people and their suspicious activities.”
Security questions
Internally, some Turkish officials blamed a lack of communication among the different branches of the intelligence community. Aksu dismissed those claims. Instead, he blamed extensive media coverage, despite a gag order: He said the coverage alerted suspects to the fact that the authorities were closing in.
