The LA Times reports that the Madrid train bombers financed their atrocities in part by selling hashish: Jihad’s Unlikely Alliance. (Hat tip: Ethel.)

MADRID — The odd crew of longtime extremists and radicalized gangsters accused of carrying out the March train bombings here nourished their holy war with holy water.

And hashish.

The water came from Mecca, the Muslim holy city in Saudi Arabia. The conspirators drank it during purification rituals at a barbershop that was an after-hours prayer hall for adherents of Takfir wal Hijra, a secretive Islamic sect allegedly active in the criminal underworld of Europe and North Africa.

The hashish came from Morocco, European investigators believe. The ideologues of the terrorist cell justified selling drugs as a weapon of jihad. The Moroccan dealer who financed the plot traded a load of hashish for the dynamite that slaughtered 191 people aboard commuter trains on March 11. The drug trafficker led the cell along with a Tunisian economics student, a duo whose disparity reflects the evolving nature of Islamic terrorism. Both blew themselves up after a standoff with Spanish police last month.

As investigators analyze the Madrid bombings and try to prevent new attacks, they are intrigued by the importance of the drug connection. The predominantly Moroccan cell came together with remarkable speed, teaming a drug gang with students and shopkeepers and raising the specter of “narco-terrorism,” a phenomenon more commonly associated with such nations as Colombia. It also offers a textbook example of the potentially explosive combination of Islamic extremism and organized criminal networks.

“It worries us very much,” a Spanish police commander said. “Until now, Islamic terrorism and drugs were two separate areas. Now you are not sure where to look. You are not sure whom you are dealing with. I don’t know of any previous cases like this in the West.”

Madrid’s hidden jihad reflects a wider effort by Islamic networks in Europe and North Africa to tap the violent energy of criminal networks of diverse ethnicities and specialties, anti-terrorism officials say.

In Italy, a member of the Camorra, the Neapolitan Mafia, converted to Islam and recently set up an exchange of arms for drugs between the Camorra and Islamic terrorists, an Italian prosecutor said.

In the prisons of Belgium and neighboring countries, recruitment by Islamic groups has accelerated during the worldwide terrorism offensive stoked by the war in Iraq, said Belgian police anti-terrorism commander Alain Grignard.

“The intermingling of terrorist networks with the criminal milieu is becoming more and more important,” said Grignard, an expert on Islam. “It’s in prisons where political operatives recruit specialists whom they need to run their networks — specialists in fraudulent documents, arms trafficking, etc. They use concepts that justify crime, that transform it into redemption…. The prisons of today are producing the terrorists of tomorrow.”