As a Europe-wide clampdown on terror continued, France was holding seven suspects in custody as part of a probe into potential attacks against US interests on its territory, police sources said Saturday.
The seven men and women were picked up in dawn raids in the Paris suburbs on Friday after a tip-off from a militant Franco-Algerian Islamist, Djamel Beghal, arrested in Dubai in July.
The seven could be held for up to four days and are being interrogated by counter-intelligence officers who launched an inquiry on September 10 into a possible attack against the US embassy in Paris.
It is still unclear whether there is any direct link between the suspects and the attacks on September 11 in New York and Washington, which have been attributed to networks close to Osama bin Laden, a Saudi-born extremist who is believed to be hiding out in Afghanistan.
In Brussels, meanwhile, police on Friday arrested two people in possession of large quantities of potentially dangerous chemicals, legal sources report.
Investigators discovered 100 kilos of sulphur and 50 kilos of acetone in the suspects' possession.
The arrests in the Belgian capital are said to be linked to the case of Nizar Travelsi, a Tunisian-born former soccer player arrested on September 13 on several charges, including attempting to use explosive materials and possession of false papers.
Commenting on Travelsi's arrest on September 17, Belgian magistrate Bernard Michel said he believed "a mujaheddin network belonging to radical islamist movements" was active in Europe.
The anti-terror dragnet has been extended in Germany, with press reports saying links have been established between some suspects in police custody and people close to bin Laden.
The German weekly magazine Der Spiegel reports in its issue to be published on Monday that one of the suicide pilots in the September 11 attacks against the US has been shown by investigators to have had contacts with a Syrian suspected of belonging to bin Laden's al-Qaeda organization.
According to Der Spiegel, 23-year-old Marwan al-Shehhi, named by the US authorities as the pilot of United Airlines Flight 175 that crashed into the south tower of the World Trade Center, had contacts with a 43-year-old Syrian living in Hamburg.
Germany's Federal Criminal Investigation Office (BKA) first came across the Syrian in connection with the arrest of bin Laden's finance chief near Munich in 1998.
The same Syrian has also been determined by US authorities to have links to Wadih al-Hage, a Lebanese-American convicted in the United States in May in connection with bombings of the US embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam in 1998.
Said Bahaji, who is also wanted in connection with the attacks against the US but who disappeared from his Hamburg home before German investigators could track him down, is said to have been in contact with another Syrian connected to bin Laden's finance chief.
The Syrian was reportedly a witness at the wedding of Bahaji, a German national born of a Moroccan father.
German investigators are now turning their attention from Hamburg, where at least three of the suicide bombers in the September 11 attacks lived and studied, to Berlin, the Berliner Morgenpost daily reported Saturday.
Citing sources close to the regional government, the newspaper said judicial authorities in the German capital have given the green light for a vast operation to be launched against Islamic extremists, allowing investigators to minutely go over data concerning students and other nationals of 14 Arab countries.
A spokeswoman for the Berlin regional interior ministry would neither confirm nor deny the report, saying only that the police and intelligence services in the region were doing everything necessary under the present situation.
Meanwhile, another German weekly magazine Focus says in its edition to be published on Monday that another of the alleged suicide pilots in the attacks against the World Trade Center was under US surveillance when he lived in Germany.
Focus says that Mohammed Atta, identified by the US' Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) as the man who piloted American Airlines flight 11 which crashed into the north tower of the World Trade Center, was being watched by US intelligence from January to May 2000, while he was a student in Germany.
According to Focus, that surveillance showed that Atta had acquired significant quantities of chemicals which could be used to make bombs from pharmacies in the Frankfurt region.
Meanwhile, the Polish press reports that one of the suspects in the September 11 attacks in the US was married to a Polish national and traveled to Poland on several occasions.
One newspaper, Gazeta Wyborcza says it was Atta who was married to a Polish woman, while another, the Rzeczpopolita daily, says it is one of the suspected terrorists arrested in Florida after the September 11 attacks -- PARIS (AFP)
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