Posted on 04/23/2002 12:27:21 AM PDT by kattracks
The German government said yesterday it was certain that terrorists were responsible for the blast in Tunisia earlier this month that killed 17 people, most of them German tourists.There is persuasive evidence that the explosion, originally described as an accident, was al-Qaida's first operation after the September 11 jetliner attacks on New York and Washington.
Links between the key suspect in the Tunisia attack and an alleged member of the Hamburg cell at the heart of the September 11 conspiracy have been traced.
Speaking after talks in Tunis with President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, the German interior minister, Otto Schily, said: "The certainty that this was a criminal terrorist act arises from material evidence we have received."
Mr Schily was accompanied on a two-day visit to Tunisia by Germany's chief terrorist prosecutor, Kay Nehm.
Eleven Germans, five Tunisians and a Frenchman were killed when a tanker thought to be carrying liquefied gas blew up at the gate of north Africa's oldest synagogue on the tourist island of Djerba.
The suicide bombing was initially described as a "tragic accident" by the Tunisian authorities, which were threatened with the loss of millions of pounds of tourist income.
A spokeswoman for Mr Nehm's office confirmed that shortly before the attack the driver of the lorry telephoned a German man, a convert to Islam living in the Ruhr area, identified only as "Christian G".
The German media reported that the police had searched the flat of an associate of "Christian G" and found the telephone number of one of the most wanted men in the global manhunt for the September 11 assailants.
Ramzi bin al-Shibh, a Yemeni who fled Germany shortly before September 11, shared a flat with Mohammed Atta, the Egyptian suspected of masterminding the operation.
Mr Bin al-Shibh is believed to have intended to take part in the September 11 attacks. Like Mr Atta, he applied for flight training in Florida but was unable to get a visa, reportedly because he was suspected of being connected with an earlier al-Qaida operation, the bombing of the USS Cole in October 2000.
The Djerba blast occurred five days before the Frankfurt trial of five alleged al-Qaida guerrillas accused of plotting another bombing, in the French city of Strasbourg in December 2000.
Their trial, due to resume today, is the biggest so far of alleged members of Osama bin Laden's terror network.
A German survivor of the Tunisian synagogue attack, Michael Esper, 35, told the newspaper Bild yesterday: "The force of the blast was so great that I couldn't hold on to my son's hand and I was hurled through the synagogue on to the floor.
"A huge flame flashed through the door. It flared around my son's face, burning his arms and back."
The boy was still in a coma, he said.
After their initial insistance that it was an accident, the Tunisian authorities now say they are "investigating in all directions".
But the official news agency, Tap's report on Mr Schily's visit to Tunisia only mentioned as an afterthought that he had visited the site of the "dramatic explosion" in Djerba.
Last week, unnamed state security sources told Tap that they were looking into claims made to two Arab-language newspapers that al-Qaida was responsible for the explosion.
It has emerged from the US-led investigation of al-Qaida in the past seven months that Tunisian Islamists played a prominent role.
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