Hardline terrorists, especially those who provide financial and logistical support to jihadists, face strict surveillance.
By Anthony Bruno
The French government hopes that its efforts to integrate France's Muslim population more fully into French society will lessen the likelihood that young French Muslims will become terrorists in the future. But these same initiatives will have no effect—or only a negative effect—on those fundamentalists who are already committed to violent struggle. For those hardened terrorists and their recruits, the French have adopted a hard-line policy of intense surveillance. The case of Ouassini Cherifi, aka "Monsieur Bourgeois," shows how the French method has evolved in recent years.
The public tends to think of Islamic terrorists as wild-eyed, bearded zealots spouting a creed of hatred. But for every shouting suicide bomber, there is a network of supporters who aid the cause in subtler but crucial ways. French terror expert Roland Jacquard told Time Europe, "Today's Al Qaeda networks use smart, educated, respectable men for logistics and support work. Not only are they less likely to arouse suspicion and get caught, but their longevity and experience are invaluable assets to the cells they assist in planning terror."
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| French terror expert Roland Jacquard |
To the outside world, Ouassini Cherifi seemed an assimilated, upwardly-mobile first-generation Frenchman, but beneath the veneer Cherifi was in fact a radical Islamist who provided financial and logistical support to jihadists in the field.
Born in a Paris suburb, Cherifi is one of seven children born to Algerian immigrant parents. He was a diligent student and earned a degree in computer science and mathematics. Outgoing and charming, he worked two jobs after college—one with a software company, the other as a head receptionist at the Novotel Hotel in Aulnay-sous-Bois, just outside Paris. By 1999, at the age of 25, he had a wife and a son and was making a good living. If it hadn't been for a random postal inspection, Cherifi's secret double life would have gone undetected.
Cherifi had resigned from his job at the hotel in November 1999 but continued to get mail there under the name "Monsieur Bourgeois." Postal inspectors opened a packaged addressed to "M. Bourgeois" and discovered a number of forged French passports made in Thailand. The police arrested Cherifi when he went to pick up the package, and a search of his premises uncovered a machine for forging credit cards.
The authorities accused Cherifi of providing passports for terrorists and using fraudulent credit cards to finance terrorist activities. Cherifi contended that he had no such terrorist connections and that he was simply a crook who defrauded for his own enrichment. But a December 2000 raid on an Al Qaeda cell in Frankfurt, Germany, yielded a batch of fake French passports with the same grammatical and spelling errors as those in "M. Bourgeois'" package. Furthermore, telephone numbers linked to members of this cell were found in Cherifi's mobile phone. The Frankfurt cell was planning an attack on the cathedral and Christmas market in Strasbourg, France.
Cherifi also had the phone number of Abu Doha, an Al Qaeda supporter and recruiter based in London who is suspected of taking part in a plot to bomb Los Angeles International Airport. French authorities learned that Cherifi had made four trips in 2000 to suspected militant Islamic recruitment locations in London where he allegedly received direct orders from Doha.
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