PARIS, Feb 10: French authorities say that one of the three men arrested last Monday, (Feb 4) in Paris, has “come clean” with them and made a number of “stunning revelations” not only about the presence of Al-Qaeda in France but also about the functioning of the camps being operated in Afghanistan by them in which the suspect reveals that he spent several months.

Indeed, says a source at France’s principal counter-espionage service, the Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire (DST, the French equivalent of the FBI), the terrorist, identified as Yassine Aknouche, has claimed that he had spent several months at one of the camps operated by the Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan.

He told interrogators that at one of the camps he made the acquaintance of Richard Reid, the British citizen who attempted to blow up an American Airlines flight from Paris to Miami on Dec 22, and Zacharias Messaoui, the Franco-Algerian national, presently being held in the US — where he is accused of having participated in the preparation of the Sept 11 attack on the World Trade Center.

Aknouche was arrested by the DST on Feb 4 during an early morning raid in Paris, which also netted two other suspects. He is presently being held at the DST headquarters in Paris, where he and his two suspected accomplices are said to have made important revelations about their operations and their contacts in Afghanistan.

Their existence came to light as the result of the arrest in Germany in December 2000 and April 2001 of several members of another group with suspected links to Al-Qaeda.

According to police sources, one of the three persons arrested on Feb 4 is an Algerian national, while his wife is a French citizen, as is a third member of the group. The DST source could not ascertain whether Aknouche was in fact the Algerian national in question.

The DST source also said that Aknouche surprised interrogators with his willingness to tell them everything regarding the nuts- and-bolts of the operation of Al-Qaeda in France, indeed the source notes that he is the first such Al-Qaeda suspect who has not chosen to remain silent.

“We were especially surprised,” says the DST source, “that he volunteered information that we did not expect him to know, especially with regard to the presence in an Al-Qaeda camp in Afghanistan of both Richard Reed and Zacharias Messaoui, who, he says, were there at the same time, and were in direct contact not only with himself but with each other.”

“This is a spectacular revelation,” says the source, “for it’s the first time that we are able to establish, with the direct testimony of somebody who was present, that two suspected terrorists (Reed and Messaoui) were trained at Al-Qaeda camps in Afghanistan, and that they were in direct touch with each other.”

The only regret expressed by the interrogators is that they were unable to obtain any more precise information as to the time and place of the terrorist attacks that one of the three arrested suspects said had been planned by Al-Qaeda against French objectives “in the coming months.”

The interrogators say that French authorities are “taking very seriously” the possibility of such attacks, and indeed have taken security measures as a result.

The authorities say that they’ve received instructions not to make public the existence of such threats “at least until after elections are over,” that is, after May 5, the second round of presidential elections.