The suspects, who had been tracked by Turkish authorities for months before their arrest, were in possession of Turkish-subtitled video cassettes attributed to Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden calling for a jihad, or holy war, against the "great Satan" of America, according to the reports.

They were allegedly planning to bomb the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) summit scheduled for June 28 and 29 in Istanbul -- the scene of four bloody suicide bombings five months ago -- where Bush and other world leaders will attend, according to police sources quoted by the papers.

The suspects were arrested in raids carried out jointly by Turkish secret police and anti-terrorist units in the northwestern city of Bursa, though no dates were disclosed.

Nine of them were charged Monday by a Bursa court with "membership in an outlawed terrorist organization" and 16 others, arrested in the Bursa raids and separate operations in Istanbul, were released.

The Hurriyet newspaper said the suspects confessed to prosecutors they were planning a suicide attack to kill Bush.

The June summit in Turkey, NATO's only Muslim member, will be the first time the heads of state and government of the 26 NATO members gather in Istanbul, and the war in neighboring Iraq was expected to feature high on the agenda.

The nine were charged with membership in an Iraq-based Islamic extremist group called Ansar al-Islam, an organization Washington says is linked to Al-Qaeda.

The Hurriyet and Vatan papers said several of them underwent physical and psychological training in Pakistan to prepare them to carry out a suicide mission.

At least one of the suspects had been trained in flying gliders, the two papers said.

Pakistan is one of Washington's pivotal allies in the campaign to kill or capture Al-Qaeda fighters, and has vowed to capture hundreds of Al-Qaeda-linked fighters and their tribal protectors it says are hiding out in Pakistan's remote northwest frontier, a deeply conservative region where Osama bin Laden is believed to have taken shelter.

The reports said searches of the Turkish suspects' homes and work places turned up huge quantities of weapons and bomb-making equipment including timers, detonators, chemicals and instruction manuals.

Plans for an attack against a bank and a synagogue in Bursa were also seized, the reports said.

Bursa governor Oguz Kagan Koksal said the suspects were arrested after being followed for the last year and had been planning to flee to Iraq to fight US troops there after carrying out their planned attack in Turkey.

A NATO spokesman in Brussels on Monday said a change of venue for the June summit was "not under consideration".

"The Turkish authorities are responsible for security and we have confidence in them," the spokesman said.

Turkish authorities have been on edge since a small radical group also linked to Al-Qaeda carried out four suicide attacks in November in Istanbul against two Jewish synagogues, a British bank and the British consulate, leaving 62 people dead and hundreds injured.

These attacks were officially blamed on local extremist movements.

The US State Department has described Ansar al-Islam as a group of mainly Kurdish and Arabic militants, often trained in Afghanistan and linked to Al-Qaeda.

The group controlled a small enclave in northeastern Iraq before it was crushed by US troops in late March 2003, in the first month of the US-led war in Iraq.

All rights reserved. Copyright 2003 Agence France-Presse. Sections of the information displayed on this page (dispatches, photographs, logos) are protected by intellectual property rights owned by Agence France-Presse. As a consequence, you may not copy, reproduce, modify, transmit, publish, display or in any way commercially exploit any of the content of this section without the prior written consent of Agence France-Presse.

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