Three leaders of Belgium Al-Qaeda terror cell jailed

A Brussels court yesterday sentenced three leaders of an Al-Qaeda-linked terror cell accused of recruiting fighters for Afghanistan to between five and eight years in jail.

The court handed down an eight-year term to the main figure in the trial, Malika El Aroud, a 50-year-old Belgian militant Islamist of Moroccan extraction.

Ms Aroud - widow of one of the killers of Ahmed Shah Massoud, head of the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance in Afghanistan - had been on trial since March along with eight others, including two defendants tried in absentia.

Mr Massoud was assassinated in 2001 just days before Al-Qaeda's September 11 attacks in the US.

Despite her denials, Ms Aroud was found guilty of "leading a terrorist group linked with Al-Qaeda", which recruited youngsters in Belgium and France to wage "jihad" in Afghanistan.

Her lawyer said she would appeal the sentence.

Ms Aroud, who was acquitted a few years ago when an extremist group went on trial in Belgium, oversaw internet websites from Belgium and Switzerland calling for "holy war", the court said in its findings.

Ms Aroud had told the court she was "opposed to terrorism of any kind but in favour of 'jihad'."

But the court said this was "hardly consistent with her close links to Al-Qaeda," whose activities could not be tied to a "fight for national liberation" as the lawyers of several defendants had claimed.

Court president Pierre Hendrickx underlined that during a hearing Ms Aroud had "apologised to pigs for comparing them to US soldiers".

He said she was responsible for creating a staging ground for Al-Qaeda mentoring of "simple-minded people" and contributing to the financing of volunteers, Mr Hendrickx said.

Ms Aroud "may not be mentally stable" but as a mastermind she "deserves a very stiff sentence", he added.

The Brussels court also gave an eight-year jail term, in absentia, to her second husband Moez Garsallaoui, who stood accused of escorting young recruits between Turkey and the Afghan-Pakistan border, where he is now believed to be hiding.

Hisham Beyayo, described as the group's third in command, was one of the volunteers who trained in an Al-Qaeda camp.

He received a five-year sentence, with 23 months suspended for managing the websites set up by Ms Aroud and her husband and organisational work done in Mr Garsallaoui's absence.

Of the six other accused, one was acquitted while the five others, one of them in absentia, received jail terms of between three and five years for "membership of a terrorist group".

All defendants had pleaded not guilty.

They were arrested in Belgium in late 2008 shortly after Mr Beyayo returned from Pakistan's Waziristan region.

Waziristan is the powerbase of Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), which has been the only militant group to claim the attempted bomb attack in New York's Times Square, and a hotbed of Islamist militancy known for its bomb-making factories and suicide attackers.