Posted on 12/04/2003 4:14:55 PM PST by FairOpinion
Top investigator says arrest of alleged Islamist in Munich raises alarm bells
Germany's top-ranking police officer warned on Thursday that the arrest of a suspected Islamist radical in Munich pointed to the existence of a far-reaching “network of Islamist terror“ operating in Germany.
Ulrich Kersten, the president of the Federal Office of Criminal Investigation, or BKA, stressed however that he had no information that any attacks were being planned in this country.
Kersten said the man identified only as Mohammed L., a 29-year-old ethnic Kurd from Iraq arrested at the main Munich train station on Tuesday, had been in contact with a number of other suspected Islamists detained recently. Their apparent specialty, he said, was obtaining weapons and smuggling Islamists into Europe. The alleged Islamist came under scrutiny as part of the expanded investigations launched in Germany since Sept. 11, 2001, when a Hamburg-based cell of young foreign-born Islamists believed to be under the direction of Al Qaeda carried out the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
Apart from immigration violations, criminal charges have materialized in only a few of the cases.
Kersten said investigations had revealed ample ties between Mohammed L. and Islamists abroad, but he declined to elaborate. “The threat is still there, and it cannot be foreseen that it will decline,“ said Kersten, adding, “All in all, I think we can talk about a network of Islamist terror.“
Kersten did not link Mohammed L. to Al Qaeda, but press reports in Munich said he was the suspected local leader of the Kurdish-dominated Ansar al-Islam group, which has been linked by some officials to Osama bin Laden's organization.
Munich's Süddeutsche Zeitung newspaper, citing unidentified sources close to the investigation, said the immigration charges on which Mohammed L. was being held involved the attempted smuggling of two fellow ethnic Kurds from Iraq into Germany. The paper also said he was suspected of arranging the smuggling of a dozen Islamists into Iraq, where they were allegedly assigned to carry out suicide bombings against U.S. targets. Ansar al-Islam, which means “supporter of Islam,“ has been blamed by American officials for the bombing of the Jordanian Embassy in Baghdad in August, which left 17 people dead and a large number injured.
The Süddeutsche Zeitung, citing unnamed sources in the Bavarian Office for the Protection of the Constitution, which combats political extremism, said Ansar al-Islam was believed to have as many as 100 members in Munich and other Bavarian cities, and an unknown number in other German cities.
The chief Munich prosecutor, August Stern, said Mohammed L. had been arrested because investigators feared he was about to leave the country. Stern did not divulge where the suspect, who remained in investigative custody on Thursday, was thought to be heading.
It will only happen when the US takes full responsibility for everything bad that has happened in history -- ever, reimburses every country for all real and imagined debts, submits to the U.N., installs a socialist dictator, takes all of the money away from private citizens and gives it to crack-whores and criminals, destroys its military in its entirety, and submits to Islam.
If I may go off on a tangent, I was listening to Glenn Beck the other day. He had a story about a Korean reunification group that has decided that the United States owes the country of Korea an amount of money into the Quadrillions. For those interested, the number looks like "XXX,XXX,XXX,XXX,XXX,XXX.XX"
Those b*st*rd Islamist radicals have have infested the whole world just like cockroaches and just as hard to exterminate.
Sounds sensible to me. Perhaps in this instance, we could take a lesson from the Germans.
Prairie
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