The Para: Questioning Him for the Keys to the Kingdom of al-Qaida?

My reporting on the case of Saifi Ammari, a.k.a. “The Para”, ended with my transfer out of the Pentagon. But I later learned he eventually ended up back in Algeria after Libya dealt with the Chadian rebels who captured him. In November 2004, the Algerian French-language newspaper Le Quotidien d'Oran reported Saifi Ammari would be tried in Algeria. The newspaper had this to report:

“We are naturally interested in questioning El Para but this is an Algerian affair first," a top-level US military source told a news agency in Berlin. For the American military man, Ammari represents an immediate interest to the Americans to the degree that he possesses contacts with Al-Qa'ida's number two man, Ayman Al Zawahiry of Egypt, with whom he reportedly came into contact, via satellite telephone, from the Sahel.

For members of the American military, Abderezak El Para is a "big catch" and thus contradict the statements by the Algerian interior minister, Yazid Nouredine Zerhouni, who referred to the Salafist emir's "reduced interest" in the operational framework: "He doesn't just know many things. He's the key to open up the kingdom. If he decides to speak, he can hand over all the remaining Salafist satellite organizations in Algeria and outside it."

The American military source was thinking in particular of the small groups linked to the GSPC that have grown up in Mali and Niger in recent months. The member of the American military estimated at about "200 members" the GSPC elements who were still active but emphasized welcoming "the fantastic success" of the exfiltration from Chad and the cooperation in the regional antiterrorist fight, notably between Algiers and Tripoli: "It is clear that the Libyans played a decisive role in the negotiations with the Movement for Democracy and Justice in Chad [MDJT] to hand El Para over to Algeria. They facilitated this task, which indicates the pursuit of Libya's return to the international community and the place the country occupies to fight terrorism."

Regarding the status of the tribunal that will decide the El Para case, the opinions differ on the issue. As a former deputy leader with the Biskra airborne forces, whence the nickname El Para, Ammari could be tried as a former military deserter and because of that would fall under the jurisdiction of a military prosecutor.

Or, according to informed sources, nothing doing. Abderezak El Para really and truly was "demobilized in 1993 and stricken from the National People's Army's [ANP] special forces for disciplinary reasons." It was following that dismissal that, together with Okacha El Para, his former friend, and who was slain this past June in El-Kseur, that he joined the Armed Islamic Group [GIA] maquis in Lakhdaria.On this point, his career has been explained and he was not a "deserter" at the time of the events. And there were many of them.Abderezak El Para directed the strategy of the GIA and then the GSPC, to heavily strike military contingents in particular lethal ambushes in Lower Kabylie and in Batna and Tebessa. He was the first, according to the commando techniques, to train "Katibat Al Khadra," a sort of Pretorian guard, made up of 80 men, which was "the elite" of the GIA's terrorists. Their mission was to ensure the protection of the GIA's national emir, Djamel Zitouni, and then Antar Zouabri, and then the GSPC's Hassan Hattab.

The military training that he got from the paratroopers had helped him to impose himself within the GIA's groups as a "military adviser" to the main emirs. So a civilian jurisdiction is what will try El Para, who will answer for his crimes before civilian magistrates. His past as a soldier is an aggravating circumstance in his case and there is nothing to say that Abderezak El Para might be disposed to collaborate, whether it be opposite a civilian or military jurisdiction.