BEZIERS, France — The newspapers called him the mad shootist of Beziers. But Safir Bghioua was apparently Europe's worst nightmare: an ominous mix of small-time gangster and apprentice terrorist gone wild.
On Sept. 1, after telling his mother he would never see her again, the 25-year-old ex-convict armed himself with an RPG2 antitank weapon and a trunkload of guns and explosives more common in Afghanistan than in a small city amid the vineyards of France's Mediterranean coast.
Bghioua drove into La Deveze, the cement corridor of housing projects where he grew up. Wrapping a white bandanna around his forehead in homage to Palestinian suicide bombers, the son of Moroccan immigrants declared that the time had come to face maktub, or destiny.
Then he went on a Saturday night jihad. He blew up a policeman's car with a grenade launcher; another blast sent a vehicle occupied by four officers skidding 50 feet. Bghioua exchanged gunfire with his pursuers, carjacked two vehicles and eluded a predawn manhunt as he called police from phone booths.
"I am a soldier of God, a son of Allah," he screamed, claiming to have fought in foreign wars. "Bring in the SWAT team and let's have a big finish."
About 7:40 a.m. Sunday, he crossed paths at a gas station with the mayor's chief of staff, Jean Farret, and killed him with a burst from an assault rifle. Three hours later, SWAT snipers shot Bghioua dead in a shuttered fairground.
The rampage was front-page news in France until the carnage across the ocean on Sept. 11. Although investigators have not yet found direct links to organized terrorism, the city's mayor and other officials believe that Bghioua got his arsenal and inspiration from Islamic extremists.
"I think Islamic groups recruited, armed and trained Safir," Mayor Raymond Couderc said. "I strongly believe he had a relationship with an Islamic network, that he was a member of a sleeper network, that he had been told he could be activated at one moment or another."
Bghioua's rage did not die with him. For young toughs in Beziers, he is a martyr. After Bghioua's spree, graffiti here proclaimed: "Islam 1, Beziers O."
Criminals Justify Actions With Rhetoric
The writing on the wall spells out a menace that was only accentuated by Sept. 11. European law enforcement and intelligence officials say crime, inequality, ethnic alienation and Islamic extremism have converged in an angry subculture that makes some Muslim neighborhoods breeding grounds for terrorists and for violent criminals who justify their actions with extremist rhetoric.
In recent years, Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda network and other terrorist organizations built a recruiting apparatus targeting recently arrived Moroccan laborers in Madrid, second-generation French Algerians in Paris, disaffected converts in London and others.
The recruiters are generally hard-core holy warriors with combat credentials from Algeria, Afghanistan, Bosnia-Herzegovina or Chechnya. They cast their nets in prisons, mosques and soccer stadiums, and sent thousands of recruits to training camps in Afghanistan, the Balkans and elsewhere. Despite the pounding Al Qaeda has taken in Afghanistan, the undercover army remains in place.
And the lines between criminality and extremism are starting to blur. Hoodlums from Muslim backgrounds increasingly cloak crime with an aura of holy war, according to a recent intelligence report by a West European police force.
Terrorists "now have recourse to the services of criminal professionals whom they motivate . . . with a religious discourse," the report states. "This means that terrorists will resort more and more to criminal techniques to procure funds [bank robberies, credit card fraud, car theft rackets]. It will be extremely difficult here to separate ideology from common crime."
A French intelligence official made this comparison: Imagine that California's prison gangs and street gangs were predominantly Muslim. Imagine a global terror organization attempting to channel their capacity for mayhem, he said.
That is a troubling specter. Crime is rising in countries such as France and Spain, and Europe's population is increasingly young, Muslim and vulnerable to crime and extremism.
France balances its aggressive anti-terror battle with efforts to integrate its Muslims. As Spain absorbs a surge of immigration, recent accusations that alleged Al Qaeda recruiters were accomplices in the Sept. 11 attacks brought appeals for tolerance.
"We know that fighting terrorism, whatever its source, will benefit us all," said Mohamed Afifi Mohamed, cultural affairs director of Spain's biggest mosque. "Let us not forget that there are thousands and thousands of Muslims here living completely within the law."
