Al-Qa'ida bought anthrax spores, claims informer

War on terrorism: Egyptian Connection

The international investigation into Osama bin Laden's al-Qa'ida network is discovering ever more connections to Egypt, where a growing population of well-educated but unemployed and disaffected young men has proved a fertile recruiting ground for terrorism.

The latest link, tying al-Qa'ida to the anthrax attacks in the US, is Ahmad Ibrahim al-Najjar, a follower of Mr bin Laden, who was jailed for life in Egypt last year for trying to overthrow the government and replace it with a radical Islamist regime. In prison, he has become an informer on al-Qa'ida, telling the Egyptian authorities that the network openly bought anthrax spores and other biological agents from laboratories in eastern Europe and Asia.

According to the New York Post, which obtained translations of the evidence he has given to the Egyptian authorities, al-Najjar said the anthrax was supplied by a facility in south-east Asia to the Indonesia-based Islamic Moro Front. The Indonesian-based group is connected with al-Qa'ida as well as with Abu Sayyaf, the Muslim separatist guerrilla movement in the Philippines, which itself has close ties to Mr bin Laden.

In London, police are continuing to question Yasser al-Siri, who has been sentenced to death in absentia by Egypt for his part in a failed bomb plot against a senior politician that killed a young girl.

He is accused of supplying credentials to the two Arabs posing as journalists who killed the Afghan opposition leader Ahmed Shah Masood in a suicide bombing on 9 September, two days before the attacks on New York and Washington. The assassination is believed to have been ordered by Mr bin Laden, but Mr al-Siri, who came to Britain eight years ago, denied acting illegally.

The Egyptian dissident's Islamic Observation Centre runs a website where the first report appeared that a senior Egyptian associate of Mr bin Laden, Abu Baseer Al-Masri, had been killed in Afghanistan. It alleged that he died in the American bombing but the Taliban regime later said that his death was the result of an accident while he was handling a grenade.

When the FBI released its "most wanted" list of terrorists in connection with the 11 September attacks on New York and Washington, at least a third were of Egyptian descent, including Mr bin Laden's closest associate, Ayman Rabi al-Zawahiri. The head of Islamic Jihad, the organisation that assassinated President Anwar Sadat in 1981, Dr al-Zawahiri has forged a close alliance with al-Qa'ida. He appeared next to Mr bin Laden in the video statement broadcast the day the Americans began bombing Afghanistan and is considered his designated successor.

Another link between Egypt and Afghanistan was revealed yesterday when the Saudi-owned newspaper Asharq al-Awsat reported that the translator with an eyepatch who always appears next to the Taliban ambassador to Pakistan is a former Egyptian army corporal. It said that Abdel Aziz Moussa al-Jamal was detained for three years after Mr Sadat's assassination and on his release headed for Afghanistan, where he lost an eye while fighting the occupying Soviet forces in the 1980s.

Dr al-Zawahiri's influence is thought to explain Mr bin Laden's belated interest in the Palestinian cause, but his background – he was a medical practitioner before abandoning a Western lifestyle and turning to Islamist militancy – has become a model for many other young Egyptians. The most notable example was Mohamed Atta, an impeccably middle-class man with two degrees who ended up piloting one of the jets that destroyed the World Trade Centre.

Social conditions in Egypt are expected to produce many more recruits for a holy war against the West. Unlike many developing countries, Egypt provides free education, but its battered economy has no jobs. Earlier this year, the government stopped its decades-old policy of providing a civil service job for every Egyptian who graduated from university. The anger resulting from this decision has fed a wave of student demonstrations against America's ongoing Afghanistan campaign.

The Egyptian authorities have spent much of the past 20 years imprisoning thousands of home-grown Islamic militants. President Hosni Mubarak recently announced military court trials for another 250 men suspected of being connected to al-Qa'ida.

Nabil Osman, the chairman of Egypt's State Information Service, said: "We in Egypt have been warning the West for years about the threat posed by these people. But while we have locked people up, you have given them safe haven courtesy of the European taxpayer. And when we have demanded that they be returned to Egypt to face trial, these people claimed asylum and you let them stay."

Mr Osman said Egyptian-born extremists at the heart of al-Qa'ida should be considered "Afghan Arabs" – a reference to the decade they spent fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan. "And then they are European citizens," he added, citing Atta, who lived in Germany for many years, as a case in point.

The Egyptian authorities may now be facing a new wave of Islamic fervour. As fighting continues in Afghanistan, there are fears that the anger of the country's "educated poor", as they have been dubbed by economists, could spill over into the extremism espoused by Mr bin Laden.