Fasten your seat belt low and tight before you read Dan Darling’s Fourth Rail post based on translations of two articles for the German political magazine Cicero. You knew that Iran was supporting al Qaeda, right? But did you know how wide and deep that relationship is?
While President Ahmadinejad’s call for the annihilation of Israel elicited (and rightly so) a great deal of international outcry even among the Iranian regime’s staunchest defenders, at some point one must consider that it is far more important what the Iranian government does than what it says.
Towards that end, I would like to call the readers’ attention to two articles that have appeared in the German political magazine Cicero over the last year. The first, published last spring, was apparently so concerning to the German government in terms of the information contained that it prompted a raid on Cicero’s Potsdam-based offices by German authorities. To the best of my knowledge, much of this information has yet to be widely reported in the English media.
This blog post will contain the full text of the first Cicero article courtesy of the Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS) and the relevant portions of the second courtesy of Rantburg poster Iblis with relatively little commentary, enabling readers to read both of them and draw their own conclusions.
The World’s Most Dangerous Man
by Bruno Schirra
Supported by Iran, gone underground in Iraq, Abu Mus’ab al-Zarqawi has been pulling the strings of Islamist terrorism, becoming Usama Bin Ladin’s new crown prince and an unscrupulous Holy War fighter. (…)
AFP has a short brief on the most recent Cicero article (Saad bin Laden is Osama’s son thought to be his designated successor):
Iran is providing refuge to around 25 leading members of the Al-Qaeda terror group including three of Osama bin Laden’s sons, a German magazine reported.
Cicero magazine said Saad, Mohammed and Othman bin Laden as well as other Al-Qaeda members from Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Uzbekistan, north Africa and Europe were living in and around Tehran under the protection of Iran’s Republican Guard.
The magazine quoted a “top-ranking Western secret service agent” as saying the Al-Qaeda members were free to move around.
“They are not under arrest or house arrest,” the unnamed source told the respected monthly Cicero. “They can do what they like.”
Saad bin Laden, who is around 25, is thought to have played a key financial and logistical role in several Al-Qaeda attacks and is on a US most-wanted list.
Osama bin Laden is believed to have more than 20 sons by several wives.
The article was written by journalist Bruno Schirra.
Cicero and Schirra made national headlines in Germany last month when police raided the magazine’s offices and Schirra’s Berlin home after he wrote a story alleging links between Iran and Al-Qaeda’s frontman in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.
The police were searching for evidence to identify Schirra’s sources after he quoted classified German documents in that story.
For more background on Iran and al Qaeda, derived from the 9/11 Report, see Bill Roggio’s Terror Inc.
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