INTERVIEW-Belgian spy chief cautions on Guantanamo inmates
* Guantanamo inmates have 'aura', influence among militants
* Caution on accepting them mirrors German reluctance
* Belgium a potential target as NATO, EU headquarters
By Philip Blenkinsop
BRUSSELS, May 11 (Reuters) - Countries need to think carefully about agreeing to take in prisoners from the U.S. camp at Guantanamo Bay because of the influence they command in militant circles, Belgium's spy chief said on Monday.
U.S. President Barack Obama has vowed to close the detention centre by early 2010 and is lobbying allies in Europe and elsewhere to accept prisoners who are not believed to pose a security threat but cannot return to their home countries because of a risk of torture.
Alain Winants, administrator general of the Belgian state security service, said people who had been held in Guantanamo could enjoy an "aura" among radicals.
"I think that is something that one should think about when taking in some of those persons, that these are individuals who have a big influence," he told Reuters in an interview.
Many European governments have criticised Guantanamo, where hundreds of people were held for years, mostly without charge, as a stain on the U.S. human rights record. But so far they have not rushed to help Obama close it, and the issue is shaping up as a delicate one in relations with his new administration.
German Interior Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble said in an interview published at the weekend that Washington had not so far provided his government with enough information to decide on whether to accept any prisoners.
"First, are we sure that these people do not pose a threat, because this a worry of many citizens here. Second, why can't the United States take them on? And third, do they have a link to Germany?" Schaeuble told Bild newspaper.
'POLE OF ATTRACTION'
Belgium's Winants said Guantanamo veterans, by virtue of their experience there, were "a big pole of attraction" to "other people who want to contact them, who want to hear what they have seen".
He cited Malika El Aroud, one of six people Belgium has been holding since December on suspicion of links to al Qaeda, as another figure with a "special aura" for militants.
El Aroud, the widow of one of the two men who assassinated anti-Taliban Afghan rebel leader Ahmad Shah Masood in a suicide bomb attack two days before the Sept. 11 attacks in 2001, was well known to security officials as a propagandist on militant Islamist websites.
Winants said Belgium, as the headquarters of NATO and the European Union, was "very aware of the threats" to its security.
Local Islamist militant suspects of North African origin, as well as Belgian converts to Islam, were drawn to Pakistan as a centre for training, frequently travelling via Turkey, he said.
"Our main problem is of these people returning to their country of origin with potentially very harmful behaviour," said Winants. "What seems to be clear is that the Pakistan region is worrying the most the Western services because it is the region where many of the radicalised people tend to go."
Winants said it was becoming increasingly difficult to track would-be Islamist militants in Belgium because they now tended to meet in small groups in private rather than at mosques.
Winants said this "garage radicalism" made it hard realistically to estimate how many radicals a given country had, but he believed that the numbers had increased. (Editing by Mark Trevelyan)
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