Posted on 03/17/2008 5:06:12 PM PDT by forkinsocket
A clerical worker was named yesterday as Germany's first suicide bomber and blamed for the deaths of two American soldiers in Afghanistan.
Cueneyt Ciftci, 28, who was born in Bavaria to a family of Turkish immigrants, is believed to have driven a pick-up truck laden with explosives into a US guard post on March 3.
An Uzbek terror group, the Islamic Jihadist Union (IJU), claimed responsibility. In the chaotic aftermath of the explosion, insurgents raked the Americans with gunfire and killed 60 men, the group claimed, adding that: “He was a brave Turk who came from Germany and exchanged his life of luxury for paradise.”
The US denied the hugely inflated casualty figure. For a week or so both the Germans and the Americans discounted the claims that the bomber was Ciftci.
But then a video clip of the Bavarian, clearly recognisable to his neighbours, turned up. It showed the bearded, smiling man brandishing a pistol and pointing one finger as if to Heaven. German police are tracing his position in a network that seems to lead back to radical Bavarian mosques and to a group arrested last September for preparing explosives to bomb Frankfurt airport.
Ciftci's involvement puts further pressure on Angela Merkel, the Chancellor, to shift forces from the relatively calm north of Afghanistan to the more active south.
Yesterday a suicide car bomber there killed three Nato soldiers, two Danish and one Czech, as well as an interpreter and three civilians. “We have to start looking at what this means for our society,” said a German security official. “How open are we for Islamic radicalisation?”
Ciftci was born in Freising in Bavaria, the son of Turks who had migrated in the 1960s. He did well at school, spoke German with a lilting Bavarian accent. In theory he could have become a German citizen but he chose to remain a Turk. The family moved near Nuremberg, and he started to say his prayers at a mosque that has been under surveillance.
He married and had two children but last April he resigned from his clerical job and deregistered himself at the town hall. Most foreigners do not bother to do this when leaving the country, but Ciftci was a stickler for German bureaucracy.
His exit seems to have been organised by his friend Adem Yilmaz, under arrest after police raids broke up his cell of explosives experts preparing for an attack on Frankfurt airport, Ramstein airbase and other US targets in Germany. The other members of the cell, Fritz Gelowicz and Daniel Schneider, were white native Germans prompting the authorities to worry about German converts to Islam.
But the real cause for concern was Yilmaz - like Ciftci, a Turk with deep roots in Germany, who had, unnoticed by the authorities or the neighbours, turned into an Islamic radical. For decades the German authorities have assumed that the more than two million Turks in the country were essentially politically neutral, apart from a sprinkling of support for the Kurdish Workers' Party.
But the connections between radical clergy - the mosque in Ulm seems to have inspired many radicals, Turks and non-Turks, across Germany - the movement of preachers between Pakistan and Europe and the access to training camps close to the Afghan border have made some German Muslims regular pilgrims.
Yilmaz is said to have organised a network that guided Turks along each stage of the journey to the Pakistan-Afghan border. Police have found e-mails between the IJU in Pakistan and Gelowicz alerting him to the arrival of “two families”. One of the families is presumed to have been that of Cueneyt Ciftci, reporting for action.
Lapses of logic. So muslim "paradise" is the antithesis to "luxury". Sound good then.
He told MI5 he wanted to return to Germany to work as a double agent and assassinate Hitler with a bomb at a Nazi rally.
According to the newly-declassified MI5 file quoted by The Times, Chapman's case officer Ronnie Reed warned him the attempt would be suicidal. "Whether or not you succeeded, you would be liquidated immediately," the file reports Reed as saying.
"Ah, but what a way out," Chapman is said to have replied.
Chapman said that his German spymaster was planning to take him to a Nazi rally once he had completed his British mission successfully. He would be placed in the "first or second row" near Hitler's podium, possibly dressed as a senior German officer. "I will assassinate Hitler," Chapman told Reed. "With my knowledge of explosive and incendiary material, it should be possible."
However MI5 rejected his offer to kill the German leader, for reasons which are still unclear. Historians believe it may have been because of the former safecracker's criminal past which did not fit with MI5's upper class culture. It may also have been motivated by fears of possible reprisals, or even because Hitler was thought to be more useful alive than dead because of his erratic behavior at that point.
Chapman returned to Germany as a double agent but was warned against undertaking any "wild enterprises" by his British spymaster, Colonel Tommy Robertson. Chapman was later awarded the Iron Cross medal by the Germans in recognition of the missions they believed him to have carried out.
Some historians believe that Chapman's German spymaster, Stephan von Gröning, may have been deliberately trying to use Chapman to assassinate Hitler. Von Gröning was opposed to Hitler, as were many German Abwehr intelligence officers.
In prounouncing his name, remember: it has two silent e’s and a silent y.
LOL.
Perhaps it's time to reconsider when to call a citizen a citizen. Obviously, this loser was never a sane German citizen. He was, by his own admission, apparently always a member of the umma which shares loyalty with no other secular entity.
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