Patsystan in the Crosshairs

“That these people were ready to go into action as terrorists in Spain — that came as a surprise,” said Judge Baltasar Garzón, Spain’s highest antiterrorism magistrate. “In my opinion, the jihadi threat from Pakistan is the biggest emerging threat we are facing in Europe. Pakistan is an ideological and training hotbed for jihadists, and they are being exported here.”

That threat has been felt elsewhere. Two of four suicide bombers who attacked London’s transit system in July 2005 had trained at a camp in Pakistan. Four of the five British men convicted last April in a plot to blow up targets in London using fertilizer bombs were of Pakistani origin and some had trained at a makeshift terrorist camp there.

Last September, when the German authorities broke up what they suspected was a plot to bomb an American Air Force base and the Frankfurt airport, they said three of the suspects, two of them German citizens, had trained at terrorist camps in Pakistan.

Officials say the Barcelona case points to a more serious dynamic: Pakistanis with no apparent previous links to Europe who appear to have been sent there on a terrorist mission.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/10/world/europe/10spain.html?hp