The Sunday Times - World
May 01, 2005
Paris agents plotted to kill UK militants
Matthew Campbell, Paris
A FORMER French secret agent has described how he was sent to
Britain to prepare the ground for the assassinations of Islamic
radicals suspected of planning a bombing campaign against the World
Cup.
Pierre Martinet, a former member of the DGSE, Frances foreign
intelligence service, was one of half a dozen French agents who
crossed the Channel as tourists on the Eurostar train a few
months before the 1998 World Cup in France to spy on potential
targets.
They included Abu Walid, a Saudi Arabian suspected of links with
the Armed Islamic Group (GIA), an Algerian terror organisation that
had killed eight people and injured more than 100 in a Paris
bombing campaign in 1995.
Martinets job was to keep the targets under surveillance until the
order was given to eliminate them: the DGSE, unlike Britains MI6,
is a military organisation with a reputation for ruthlessness
dating from 1985 when it blew up Rainbow Warrior, the Greenpeace
protest vessel, in New Zealand.
We knew the British government would not like it, said Martinet,
a 41-year-old former paratrooper, discussing his mission to
Londonistan.
No government likes it when a foreign country tries to sort out
people on its territory. But we had information that certain people
were planning to wreck the World Cup. In Paris the police were
planning big raids.
In his memoir, An Agent Comes Out of the Shadows, Martinet, who
retired from the service on the eve of the September 11 attacks
against America in 2001, claims the DGSE was responsible for 150
assassinations in the Algerian war of independence. He does not
know if it has killed so far in the war against terror. I can only
assume so, he said last week.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0%2C%2C2089-1592511%2C00.html
