"We knew that there was a threat of kidnapping in 2003, but the evaluation of something resembling a military action is new to me," attorney Brynjar Meling told newspaper Dagbladet on Friday.
Meling was responding to a report in the international magazine Newsweek that US officials at the Pentagon considered sending special forces to Oslo to seize Krekar, who recently landed on both US and UN lists of people suspected of supporting or financing terrorism.
The Newsweek article claimed Krekar was the subject of "intense" talks in Washington in 2003 and that the Pentagon evaluated sending Navy Seals to Oslo to kidnap Krekar and confine him in another country for questioning.
The alleged military plan was ultimately dropped because Pentagon officials feared their forces could land in a gun battle with Norwegian police charged with protecting Krekar.
Mullah Krekar, who first came to Norway as a refugee in the early 1990s, has long been a headache for the Norwegian authorties. He violated the terms of his asylum by travelling back to northern Iraq, where he led the guerrilla group Ansar al-Islam, which is believed linked to terrorist group al-Qaida.
Krekar has since been declared a threat to national security in Norway and local authorities want to deport him, but they won't, because they fear Krekar will face the death penalty in Iraq. That, along with the fact that Krekar isn't in police custody in Norway, has frustrated the Americans who want him confined.
Politicians plead ignorance
Erna Solberg, the head of Norway's Conservative Party who was government minister in charge of immigration matters at the time, said she was never informed of any such plan. She said it would have "created a huge conflict with Norwegian authorities... but they can certainly have planned it and thought about it," she told Dagbladet.
Jan Petersen, a former head of the Conservatives who was Norway's foreign minister at the time, said he wasn't aware of any such plan, either.
"We don't know anything about it, so there's nothing to comment on," he said. "The most important thing is that it didn't happen."
