BERN, Switzerland — The trail began in the desert mayhem of Saudi Arabia and led to a suspected militant Islamic network operating in the Alpine tranquillity of Switzerland.
It started with a Saudi investigation into the May 2003 suicide attacks on three expatriate housing compounds in Riyadh by Al Qaeda that killed 26.
Investigators recovered a suspect's cellphone and made a startling discovery: The memory contained 36 Swiss numbers. And one of them belonged to an alleged Yemeni extremist based in the pristine village of Aegerten, an area known more for clockmakers than for terrorists.
The discovery led to an investigation by Swiss police that has resulted in 10 arrests during the last year. According to a preliminary indictment filed July 30, officials have uncovered a logistics and financial network in Switzerland with ties to top Al Qaeda figures and terrorist cells across Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Asia.
The indictment charges that the Swiss network supplied fraudulent documents, smuggled itinerant Middle Eastern extremists into the country and used criminal rackets to raise and move funds to cells in Europe and the Middle East.
The unlikely setting shows how extremists establish footholds in whatever corner of the world they can.
In some ways, Switzerland does not seem a hospitable base for the Al Qaeda terrorist network. The country lacks the big cities and vast Muslim neighborhoods of neighboring nations. It does not belong to the borderless European Union, making entry and exit more complicated.
The society also has a reputation for order. "It seems like every Swiss has a little bit of policeman in him," one foreign law enforcement official said. In addition, Swiss police are experienced in complex investigations because of the many international crimes that intersect with their secretive banking system.
Nonetheless, that banking system remains a magnet for the global underworld: Swiss prosecutors are pursuing two massive investigations of wealthy Arabs accused of financing Islamic extremists through Swiss bank accounts. And street-level militants know that, like other small European nations with traditions of tolerance and neutrality, Switzerland has generous political asylum laws, strong protections for criminal defendants and an ingrained respect for privacy.
Switzerland entered the picture in 2002, when European investigators found that Al Qaeda's operational boss, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, and his associates were using hard-to-trace Swiss cellular phones.
