A high-ranking Czech diplomat insisted that Mohammed Atta, the suspected ringleader of the September 11 attacks, met with an Iraqi agent in Prague a few months before the strikes, in comments cited Tuesday.
The assertion runs counter to denials that such a meeting took place in the months prior to the September 11 attacks. "The meeting took place," Hynek Kmonicek, a former deputy foreign minister who is now Czech envoy to the United Nations in New York, told the English-language Prague Post weekly.
Kmonicek said he was responsible for expelling Iraqi diplomat Ahmed Khalil Ibrahim Samir al-Ani, a second consul at the Iraqi embassy in Prague, after the meeting with Atta. Kmonicek, a senior government official with top security clearance, said al-Ani and Atta met in April 2001, as Czech officials have stated repeatedly. "At the time I was in Prague," he conveyed.
Czech Interior Minister Stanislav Gross said last October that al-Ani had been expelled from the country on April 22, several weeks following the meeting with Atta. Baghdad denied the report, saying they were "mere lies playing up to Zionist circles that are beating the war drums against Arabs and Muslims."
Last month, Newsweek cited a senior law enforcement official as saying that, after investigation, there was no evidence the meeting took place.
The reported Prague meeting became known as "the Prague connection" and was mentioned frequently as a possible pretext for renewed hostilities between the United States and Iraq.
Kmonicek said he ordered al-Ani's expulsion after failing to receive answers from the Iraqi chief of mission regarding al-Ani's role in Prague. "He didn't know (what al-Ani was up to)," Kmonicek said. "He just didn't know." (Albawaba.com)
© 2002 Al Bawaba (www.albawaba.com)
