PARIS, Aug 12: Al Qaeda has turned the Internet into a virtual classroom for its supporters, and its eviction from its bases in Afghanistan has accelerated its use of the information superhighway, security experts say.

The Internet played a key role in planning and coordinating the September 11, 2001, attacks on US landmarks, and the movement of Osama bin Laden increasingly uses the Web to recruit, spread fear and propaganda, and prepare and execute attacks, they say.

"The Internet is even more dangerous than it was in the past," said Rita Katz, director of the SITE Institute, in a telephone interview from Washington. "Whatever you had in Afghanistan in the training camps you have today on the Internet," said Katz, whose non-profit organization tracks militant Islamic sites and counts the US government and major US corporations among its clients.

"Some of the manuals (posted on the web) are the actual manuals from Afghanistan ... some written by Saif al-Adel, one of the most wanted military commanders of AQ who has not been captured. He's on the FBI most-wanted list," she said.

A recent posting detailed how to use a mobile phone in a bomb attack, a method used to kill 191 people in March in coordinated blasts on Madrid commuter trains. "It was step-by-step, and to make sure you get the picture they had a video to demonstrate it. It's scary," said Katz.

A month before a wave of kidnappings in Iraq and Saudi Arabia, she said, manuals appeared on Jihad websites with precise instructions on how to seize hostages. One was posted by Abu Hajer, who later kidnapped US engineer Paul Johnson and assassinated him, she said.

"I was asking myself why are we getting so many warnings. Maybe the answer is that this way they communicate with other members, saying look, this is our agenda." "After 9/11 I don't think Al Qaeda can be seen as much as an organisation as a movement, and that sharing of information among this movement is incredibly critical," said Jonathan Schanzer, research fellow at the Washington Institute.

"It's increasingly crucial, not so much for recruitment but in terms of communications, sending encrypted messages, coded messages, maintaining data bases etc."

CYBER THREAT: Gabriel Weimann, senior fellow with the Washington-based US Institute of Peace, said the Internet threat had been widely mis understood due to a misplaced focus on the "exaggerated threat of cyber attacks."

It is the use of the Internet for more routine purposes - not attacks on the network itself - that is worrying. In a six-year-old study under way into militants' use of the Internet, Weimann's group details routine ways militants use the web, including psychological warfare, propaganda, fundraising, recruitment, data mining and coordinating attacks. -Reuters