CRIMINALS SUPPORT TERRORISTS

Crime and security experts are not surprised that Russian mobsters may have
ordered from Hamilton forged identity documents that may have been used by
a terrorist hijacker. Police forces around the world have focused on
possible links between organized criminals and al-Qaeda terrorists since
the Sept. 11 attacks.

"Certainly these groups have mutually beneficial agendas," says David
Griffin of the Canadian Police Association. "We are not surprised to find
that on certain issues, some of these people are working together."

Canada's anti-terrorism task force is probing a Hamilton forgery operation
that may have produced fake ID used by a hijacker on United Airlines Flight
93, which crashed in Pennsylvania.

Officers investigating Hamilton paralegal Gideon Glen McGuire Augier have
refused to comment on the U.S. links.

Augier, who was detained for 20 hours and whose business has been searched
twice since Sept. 11, is alleged to have provided fake ID documents to
Russian organized crime figures since 1998.

The Hamilton suspect says police have told him they are interested in
possible links between Russian mobsters and Osama bin Laden's group.

Augier says police believe one of his regular Russian contacts may have
acted as an agent for the terrorist group.

Police suspect a fake identity produced in Hamilton was used by Saeed Ahmed
Alghamdi, one of the terrorists on Flight 93.

"You can see a convergence of needs here," Senator Colin Kenny, chair of
the Senate's standing committee on defence and security, said yesterday.

"It is clear that terrorists need things that tend to be only available
from organized crime -- expertly forged passports, arms, weapons and other
things that petty criminals and small-time hoods are unlikely to know how
to get."

Dozens, perhaps hundreds, of fake documents were obtained by the al-Qaeda
terrorists so they could enter the U.S. and live normally until the attacks.

The FBI says the 19 suspects behind the carnage all used aliases, had
varied documents with different birth dates and switched identities regularly.

Augier says Canadian task force officers have pointed to documents produced
in Hamilton in the name of Samen Singh as being used by Alghamdi -- who
used six other aliases.

Production of fake documents for the terrorists would have been been spread
around, police say. Experts believe a connection with organized criminals
makes perfect sense.

"Criminals need services, they need to buy them," said Margaret Beare,
director of the Nathanson Centre for the Study of Organized Crime and
Corruption at York University in Toronto.

"Under the best of conditions, they might buy from somebody inside the
family, who speaks the same language," Beare said. "But the best product is
not always available internally. So you go where you get the best product
at the cheapest prices for the lowest risk."

Security forces are also watching for trading in biological and nuclear
material by Russian black marketeers.

For years, chilling rumours have circulated of small, portable "briefcase
bombs" gone astray from the nuclear arsenal of the former Soviet Union.
There are allegations that bin Laden paid millions to stockpile some of the
weapons at a hideout near Kandahar in southern Afghanistan. Each
backpack-size device could kill 100,000 people.

Queries about how close a relationship exists between terrorism and
organized crime arose at a parliamentary committee yesterday during a
briefing by the police association, Griffin said.

"There is a considerable presence of eastern European organized crime in
Canada," the association director said.

"But the reality in Canada is every organized crime group in the world has
established themselves here and there is increased interest in whether
terrorists and these groups are working together."

Organized crime produces unimaginable revenue -- from drugs, prostitution,
the smuggling of illegal aliens, fraud, arms dealing and other pursuits.
That kind of financial clout has attracted high levels of interest from
terrorist groups in the past 10 to 20 years, especially in the
international drug trade.

Organized crime groups often run the trafficking organizations while
terrorist and insurgent groups control the territory where the drugs are
cultivated and transported.

But the once clear lines between the drug trade, terrorism and organized
crime have blurred and mutated sharply in the past few years as
high-profile terrorism has increased.

"We have not yet had a lot of direct testimony on the subject," says Kenny,
the Senate's security expert who also sits on the committee for organized
crime.

"You can that this convergence is logical, and we're going to see more
evidence of it as information comes forward."