OSLO TERRORIST SUSPECT TIED WITH ALBANIAN HOSTILE TO CZECHS-PRESS

OSLO TERRORIST SUSPECT TIED WITH ALBANIAN HOSTILE TO CZECHS-PRESS
Czech News Agency - September 26, 2006 Tuesday

Prague, Sept 26 (CTK) - The "Norwegian" trace that seems to have triggered unprecedented anti-terrorist measures in Prague this weekend probably involves a Prague contact of a suspected terrorist who was recently detained in Norway, the daily Mlada fronta Dnes (MfD) writes today. With the aid of Norwegian journalists, MfD has found out that one of the four men who were arrested in Norway on suspicion of terrorism last week was in contact with Princ Dobrosi, a controversial Kosovo Albanian formerly based in Prague who has unsettled accounts with the Czech Republic. In the 1990s, Princ Dobrosi operated as a drug mafia boss on European level, focusing on Scandinavia.

He managed his "empire" from Prague, where he was arrested in 1999 and extradited to Norway. The Norwegian police wanted him since 1996 when he escaped from a local prison after bribing a ward who smuggled him out in a van with dirty linen. Fugitive Dobrosi underwent a plastic surgery in Croatia. The Norwegian court sentenced Dobrosi to 14 years in prison in 1993 for heroin trafficking and the previous escape from prison. "Dobrosi had contacts with one of the people who have been detained in Norway in connection with allegedly planned attacks on Jewish targets," Gunnar Hultgreen, reporter of the Norwegian daily Dagbladet, has told MfD, citing his sources from the police and intelligence. The Oslo detainee concerned is Arfan Qadeer Bhatti, a Pakistani with a Nowergian passport who headed the four-member group suspected of planning attacks on the Israeli and U.S. embassies in Oslo. Bhatti visited Dobrosi, who had been released from Norwegian prison for his good behaviour in 2005, in Pristina, Kosovo, this summer. It is not clear whether they discussed a possible attack on targets in Prague, MfD writes. Jiri Komorous, head of the Czech anti-drug squad, confirmed on Monday that Dobrosi spent several weeks in Prague, where his wife and two children still live, last year already. The Norwegian secret service declined to say on Monday whether it had addressed a warning to the Czech Republic. Komorous did not want to comment either on wether Dobrosi is tied with terrorists. "We don't have information that he would continue pursuing drug business," Komorous told MfD. rtj/t/ms