Islamic radicals held training camps for potential recruits across France through 2002, Le Parisien newspaper reported Wednesday, adding that French investigators believe they have successfully dismantled the network running the camps.

Recruits were sent to seven sites - including one in the Normandy city of Dieppe, one in the southeastern Alps, and a site in the Fontainebleau forest outside Paris - for rugged, outdoor exercises and religious and political indoctrination, the daily said.

The purpose of the sites was to take untested candidates and determine whether they were fit for jihad in battle zones like Afghanistan and Chechnya, the newspaper said, citing an unnamed intelligence officer.

Most recruits came from Paris-region mosques where religious leaders preached a hardline brand of Islam, the newspaper said.

The newspaper said that investigators from the DST, France´s counterintelligence agency, believe that France has dismantled the network that ran the training camps.

Le Parisien, without citing sources, said the sites were organized by a group of radical Islamic militants now under investigation in connection with the death of an anti-Taliban military commander in Afghanistan, Ahmed Shah Massoud.

The Afghan opposition leader was slain on Sept. 9, 2001 in northern Afghanistan, two days before the terror attacks in the United States, by two men posing as journalists.

Willie Virgile Brigitte, a French man extradited from Australia on Oct. 17, is suspected of running false passports to Massood´s assassins.

Brigitte, 35, had organized survival training lessons in the Fontainebleau forest outside Paris, according to French judicial officials. Brigitte, originally from the French Caribbean island of Guadeloupe, had spent months in al-Qaida training camps in Afghanistan and Pakistan. (© 1995-2003, The Jerusalem Post 12/10/03)