NATO Troops Foil Bosnia Attack Plot by Foreign Fighters, Including Iranians

WASHINGTON —  French soldiers thwarted a planned terrorist attack on NATO troops in Bosnia on Thursday when they raided a house being used as a bomb factory and arrested 11 heavily armed foreign guerrillas, including five Iranians, a senior U.S. official said.

The official said the guerrillas, part of a contingent of Islamic militants who fought on the side of the Muslim-led Bosnian government during 3 1/2 years of ethnic war, were planning to bomb facilities of the NATO-led peace force.

If the plot had succeeded, it would have marked the first attack on NATO troops since they began their enforcement of the Bosnia peace accords negotiated late last year in Dayton, Ohio.

The U.S. official said the guerrillas are being held for questioning by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization-led Implementation Force, or IFOR. He said they probably will be expelled from Bosnia, although other actions may also be taken against them.

State Department spokesman Nicholas Burns said the presence of the guerrillas in Bosnia was a “flagrant violation” of the Dayton accords, which required the Bosnian government to send home by Jan. 19 all of its foreign allies drawn from a variety of Islamic countries.

He said that unless the Bosnian government moves quickly to expel the remaining guerrillas, the United States will be unable to go ahead with a plan to arm and train the Bosnian army.

“In Rome, this will become a very big issue,” Burns said, referring to a meeting scheduled to begin Saturday in the Italian capital that will be attended by Assistant Secretary of State Richard Holbrooke and the presidents of Bosnia, Croatia and Serbia.

But officials said the Thursday incident was far more serious than a simple violation of the Dayton accords because the guerrillas were clearly targeting the peacekeepers and, by implication, the entire peace process.

The prompt action of the French IFOR troops in arresting the Islamic fighters contrasts with the NATO force’s reluctance to track down accused war criminals. Officials explained that the action against the guerrillas was an act of self-defense by IFOR.

In Sarajevo, NATO issued a terse press release describing the arrests, which it said were carried out in a Sarajevo suburb. The statement did not reveal the exact location of the house where the raid took place.

“The facts, so far, strongly suggest a serious violation [of the peace agreement] . . . that prohibits the presence of foreign forces in Bosnia-Herzegovina,” the NATO statement said.

NATO officials have said that most of the thousands of foreign guerrillas who participated in the war in Bosnia have left the country. But others simply dropped from sight and remain in the country, they said.

U.S. and NATO officials have been concerned for weeks that some of the remaining militants might attack IFOR troops, perhaps considering them symbols of Western influence.

The U.S. official who identified five of the fighters as Iranians said he did not know the nationality of the other six.