Spain arrests Al-Jazeera correspondent, alleges al Qaeda links
From CNN Madrid Bureau Chief Al Goodman
MADRID (CNN) — Spanish police arrested Al-Jazeera TV correspondent Tayseer Allouni at his home in southern Spain Friday, using an arrest warrant that accuses him of having links to “important members” of al Qaeda and using his status as a journalist to get an interview with Osama bin Laden in October 2001, his wife told CNN in a phone interview.
“A group of police came with a judicial order at noon today and searched the home,” for about three hours while Allouni was present, before taking him away, his wife, Fatima Hamed Layasi, told CNN from their home in Granada, in southern Spain.
She said the arrest warrant was from Judge Baltasar Garzon, who has been leading the investigation in Spain into alleged members of al Qaeda and other militant Islamic groups.
Asked if the charges were true, Hamed Layasi said, “Surely it is not so.”
She said she would soon hire a lawyer to defend her husband.
She said the warrant says that Allouni “took advantage of his status as a journalist to get an interview on Oct. 7, 2001, with Osama bin Laden, where bin Laden called for a holy war.”
Police took several books and newspapers in Arabic and two computers, one belonging to Allouni’s son and another, a laptop, belonging to a production company that Hamed Layasi identified as Andalusia Directo, which she said provides programming to Al-Jazeera.