Warning against arms to Al-Qaeda

Smugglers may be selling sophisticated Libyan army weapons to Al-Qaeda’s offshoot in north Africa’s Sahel region, Spain warned yesterday after a US-European security meeting in Madrid.

US Homeland Security chief Janet Napolitano and European powers pondered how to stop the arms reaching Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), Interior Minister Alfredo Perez Rubalcaba said after the talks.

The AQIM group is active in the Sahara desert and Sahel scrubland to the south – an area nearly the size of Australia stretching from western Mauritania through Mali and Niger.

It has carried out kidnappings of foreigners and staged attacks in the region.

“All of us who sat around the table know AQIM very well. There is a circumstance that worries us at the moment and that is that the Libyan conflict is affecting AQIM,” Mr Rubalcaba told a news conference at the El Pardo palace outside Madrid.

“What seems especially negative to us is the possibility that arms belonging to the Libyan army, or what is left of it, could fall into the hands of the terrorists,” he added.

“There is arms trafficking at the border between Libya and Mali and this has to worry us because it could at this moment be supplying sophisticated weapons, which are therefore dangerous, to Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb.”