U.S. RAIDS FOIL PLOTS TO SEND ARMS TO AL QAEDA AND OTHERS

WASHINGTON - Federal law enforcement officials said today that they had
broken up two major drug operations aimed at furnishing weapons to
terrorists, including Al Qaeda.

In an indictment unsealed today in San Diego, two Pakistanis and an
American were charged with plotting to trade heroin and hashish for four
Stinger antiaircraft missiles. The men are accused of telling F.B.I.
undercover agents in Hong Kong that they were planning to sell the Stingers
to Al Qaeda, which has been said to favor surface-to-air missiles.

In a second case brought in Houston, four men linked to a Colombian
rightist paramilitary organization were arrested on charges that they
sought to trade $25 million in cash and cocaine for five containers of
Warsaw Pact weapons, including 9,000 assault rifles, 300 pistols, 53
million rounds of ammunition, rocket-propelled grenade launchers, and
almost 300,000 grenades.

Two of the men arrested in Costa Rica on Tuesday in connection with the
scheme, Cesar Lopez and a second man known as Commander Emilio, were
suspected of being leaders of the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia.
United States officials have the group listed as a terrorist organization
and hold it responsible for thousand of killings and kidnappings in
Colombia in recent years.

Two Houston residents who allegedly helped broker the deal with the
Colombians were also charged in the conspiracy and are in custody,
officials said. All four could be sentenced to life in prison if convicted.

The Colombian plan, like the one in Hong Kong, was stymied by F.B.I.
undercover agents alerted to the plot, who were able to move in before the
plans could be carried out, authorities said.

Federal authorities pointed to the two cases as evidence of the dangerous
overlap between drug trafficking and groups that the United States
considers terrorist.

"We have learned and we have demonstrated that drug traffickers and
terrorists work out of the same jungle, they plan in the same cave, and
they train in the same desert," Asa Hutchinson, director of the Drug
Enforcement Administration, told reporters in announcing the arrests
alongside the attorney general, John Ashcroft, and the F.B.I. director,
Robert S. Mueller III.

The F.B.I. has shifted several hundred employees away from narcotics
investigation as it focuses on counterterrorism operations. But Mr. Mueller
and Mr. Ashcroft said drug interdiction remained a high priority for the
administration - particularly when it crosses paths with terrorist operations.

"I just would like to be on record and clear that we have not abandoned
that," Mr. Ashcroft said. "Today's indictments indicate that we are
pursuing it with intensity."

In the Colombian paramilitary case brought today in Houston, an F.B.I.
agent, Mark C. Kirby, said in a criminal affidavit that the investigation
began 13 months ago, when a confidential informant told the F.B.I. that two
men in Houston had approached him about providing Russian-made weapons to
Colombia in exchange for cocaine.

The F.B.I. set up a sting operation, with agents posing as arms dealers,
and months of meetings and negotiations began in spots around the world,
according to the affidavit. The Colombian operatives and their liaisons in
Houston were told that the arms dealers had five cargo containers of
weapons waiting for them in Cuba in exchange for $19 million in cash and
cocaine.

The deal was nearing a close in Houston two months ago, authorities said,
when one of the defendants, Uwe Jensen of Houston, gave a confidential
informant a sealed enveloped with a summary of an initial order from the
United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, or A.U.C., officials said. The
order was for 300 AK-47 assault rifles at $150 each, 300,000 rounds of
AK-46 ammunition at 10 cents each, and 500,000 F-1 grenades at $5 each, for
a total cost of $725,000.

Officials arrested the four suspects this week.

In the San Diego case, federal prosecutors brought conspiracy charges
against an American, Ilyas Ali, and two Pakistanis, Syed Mustajab Shah and
Muhammad Abid Afridi, in connection with their alleged plot to buy Stinger
missiles.

Mr. Ali, who has a Minnesota address but may have lived or worked in
Southern California, began negotiating in April in San Diego to sell large
amounts of hashish and heroin to what turned out to be an undercover
officer, officials said.

Last month, Mr. Ali, Mr. Shah and Mr. Afridi traveled from Pakistan to Hong
Kong to arrange the sale, officials said. Meeting with agents at a Hong
Kong hotel, the three said they would "offset" the sale price of the five
metric tons of hashish and 600 kilograms of heroin if the undercover agents
would provide four Stinger missiles, according to the criminal complaint
filed in San Diego.

The three men allegedly told the American undercover agents that they
wanted to sell the Stingers to members of Al Qaeda, officials said. But the
officials would not discuss whether there was any evidence suggesting that
the man had direct links to Al Qaeda.