The reporter, Tayssir Alouni, a native of Syria, gained brief fame two years ago when, as Al-Jazeera’s Kabul bureau chief, he got the first interview of bin Laden taking responsibility for 9/11. (Alouni says he scored the interview after being led, blindfolded, to a bin Laden hideaway.) But internal Spanish police documents obtained by NEWSWEEK show that Alouni, 48, has been under scrutiny since at least early 2000, when phone wiretaps revealed he was in “frequent and continuous” contact with Imad Eddin Barakat Yarkas, the suspected leader of Al Qaeda’s Spanish cell. Before moving from Granada to Afghanistan in January 2000 to open up the Al-Jazeera bureau, Alouni called Yarkas to let him know he was leaving. “It sounded like he was informing this fact to a superior in a hierarchy,” reads one report. Yarkas talked to Alouni about carrying cash to Mohamed Bahaiah–a fellow Syrian whom Spanish authorities consider a key Qaeda moneyman. Bahaiah was well known to Alouni: two years earlier, according to the report, when Bahaiah was seeking to renew his residency permit in Spain, Alouni “covered up” for him, allowing Bahaiah to list Alouni’s home address and phone number.
Last week Spanish investigating Judge Baltasar Garzon charged that Alouni took a total of $4,500 to terrorists in Afghanistan on two occasions. Alouni’s lawyers say he did take smaller sums to Syrians abroad–“a common practice in the Arab world,” says Al-Jazeera editor Ibrahim Helal. But some of the most damning evidence against Alouni, according to the police reports, is what happened when he returned to Spain from Afghanistan in July 2001. Alouni contends he was returning to visit his wife in Granada. The police reports say he very quickly had two visitors: Yarkas and Mahmoun Darkanzanli, a German-based businessman who Western intel officials have long believed was a key financier for the Hamburg cell that included 9/11 ringleader Muhammad Atta.
Helal insists that Alouni is being persecuted by the Spanish because he refused to cooperate when Western intel agencies asked him to become an informant against Al Qaeda. “They got fed up with him” because he refused to help them, Helal says. Other ex-colleagues say he never expressed the slightest sympathy for Al Qaeda. “He told me that Al Qaeda’s actions were an error and a barbarity,” says Spanish journalist Carlos Hernandez. But Judge Garzon doesn’t buy it. Last week, after interrogating Alouni, he ordered he be held indefinitely in a maximum-security prison.
