By David Nordell
In the old James Bond film ’Diamonds are Forever’ there is a scene, if I remember well, in which Bond discovers that a coffin flown into the United States for cremation is actually being used to smuggle diamonds for an American Mafia gang. Not just life imitates art, apparently, but terrorism too: according to a blog article I just received today (although it’s two months old), a Belgian-Moroccan terrorist smuggled both weapons and money from Belgium to Morocco in order to help his colleagues there.
The ’Islam in Europe blog’ article quotes from a more extensive article in the Belgian newspaper HLN (Het Laatste Nieuws) that Abdelkader Belliraj hit on the idea of using coffins because neither police nor customs would want to upset Muslim sensitivities by opening them to check their contents. He would therefore break into funeral homes to open up the caskets and hide weapons in them. By the time Belliraj was arrested in Morocco in mid-February, he had been smuggling weapons using this technique for 15 years, since 1993. In some cases, there wasn’t even a dead body in the coffin, said HLN, just money and weapons.
The director of a firm that repatriates some 500 Muslims’ bodies to Morocco every year, Jamal Ben Tahar, told the newspaper that it was impossible to take advantage of his firm for this kind of his smuggling. But it seems more than unlikely that Belliraj acted completely without accomplices: he must have known which coffins to choose to ’pad’ with resources for his fellow gang members, or must have had accomplices at the Moroccan end to open the right coffins after they were unloaded from the aircraft, or both.
But there are two things that are much more worrying about this story than the mere fact of a clever ruse to smuggle money and guns for terrorist use in Morocco. One is that neither the Belgian nor the Moroccan authorities, which have both been aware for years of the potential for the Moroccan émigré community in Belgium to support terrorist activity in both countries, never took the initiative to do at least spot-checks, if not complete screening, of the steady traffic of dead Moroccans to their homeland -- and who knows how many other dead bodies are being exploited in this way in other countries in order to increase terrorism’s death toll. From a technical point of view, checking the coffins without opening them may indeed have been problematic: metal caskets would probably not be transparent enough to X-ray scanners to show weapons inside, while even if wooden caskets were used, bundles of banknotes probably wouldn’t show up either. Given the risks involved, maybe it is indeed time for national security authorities to find ways to check the cross-border movements of coffins, even at the risk of giving offence.
The other, according to other HLN reports in the last few days quoted by the blog, is that the Belgian security service knew about Belliraj’s smuggling operation but did nothing to stop him, while the Belgian and Moroccan security services are both accusing each other of withholding vital intelligence information that could indeed have stopped this gang. It can’t be said often enough, especially in the wake of 9/11, that intelligence not shared with the right partners is wasted. In this case, it would seem, the 45 people killed in Casablanca in 2003 by a local terrorist group financed by Moroccan gangs in Belgium bear mute witness to this foul-up, whether or not they were eventually buried in coffins.
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