"The “virus” of Saudi-financed Wahhabi radicalism has “destroyed every chance” for the development of European Islam, according to a leading Muslim theologian from Bosnia-Herzegovina. Professor Resid Hafizovic of the Sarajevo Faculty of Islamic Studies, in an interview with the Bosnian secularist daily Oslobodjenje (Liberation), condemns Wahhabism as “a new plague,” promoted by “Muslim puritans and perpetual world fixers.”

He chastises the radicals as “unschooled, uneducated, confused people, who forbid their own children, for example, to study biology in school.” He describes the followers of the Saudi state sect as “a movement unsatisfied with and intolerant of everything which does not fit its ideological views, and which therefore is often predisposed to the methods of murderous ideologies that use any means to achieve their goals.”

"According to the figures of our intelligence agency we have some 3,000 Wahhabi followers in Bosnia, but that does not mean they are all terrorists," Bosnian Security Minister Sadik Ahmetovic said.

"However we cannot exclude that there are individuals among them ... who could at a certain point commit terrorist acts," he added, insisting that Bosnia's police have the capacity to deal with the menace.

Bosnian Muslims, some 40 percent of a population estimated at 3.8 million, are generally a moderate Sunni community.

During the bloody 1992-95 inter-ethnic war a number of foreign Islamic fighters joined forces with the Bosnian Muslim army. They introduced Wahhabism, also referred to as Salafism, to Bosnia and built a small following.

Currently there are some twenty radical Islamic groups in Bosnia, estimates Ahmet Alibasic, a professor of the faculty of Islamic sciences at the University of Sarajevo.

Seven suspected Islamic radicals were detained in February in Gornja Maoca, a remote northeastern hamlet seen as a key location for Bosnian followers of Wahhabism.

The men were accused of "endangering the territorial integrity" of Bosnia and confined to house arrest but have not been formally charged. 

Contacted through an intermediary, the leader of Gornja Maoca's Salafist community refused to talk to AFP. The imam who reads the important Friday prayers at Sarajevo's Saudi-funded King Fahd Mosque, known to attract Salafists, also refused to comment for this article.

The Qatar-based media giant Al Jazeera has purchased a broadcasting station in the Bosnian capital. The operation is slated to begin January 2011 in Sarajevo and later be extended to the entire region. News of the Arab broadcaster's Bosnian expansion has produced diverse reactions.

"People aren't afraid of a new war, exactly, but rather political upheaval," said Boro Kontic, head of the journalist training institution Media Center Sarajevo.

Kontic likens the arrival of the Arab media conglomerate to the atmosphere before the start of the Bosnian war, when it was announced that Sarajevo was to become regional headquarters for the European TV channel Euronews.