pong
In late 2006, Breininger got a job for a package-delivery company, where he met a Pakistani who got him interested in radical Islam. A short time later, he also became friends with a radical Islamic convert named Daniel Schneider.
Breininger began calling himself Abdul Ghaffar el Almani, avoiding his old friends and burning his CDs. He swore off drugs and alcohol. He married in a mosque, and his wife Eva P. wore a veil. The marriage was short-lived.
“He wanted me to clean and cook and said he was looking for another woman,” Eva P. later said in a television interview.
In June 2007, Breininger sold off most of his belongings on ebay, saying he wanted to go abroad and learn Arabic, and moved in with Schneider.
In September, Schneider, who had relocated to the Western German region of Sauerland, was arrested along with two other suspected Islamists for allegedly trying to make car bombs and planning attacks on US targets in Germany. Breininger disappeared before police could detain him.
Police suspect Breininger has since received training in a terrorist camp, possibly in Pakistan. Both German and American military forces in Afghanistan are reported to have distributed pictures of him, warning that he is a potential suicide attacker.
How big a danger?
The Breininger case raises the question of how great a threat German converts to Islam pose.
“Converts can be more easily radicalized,” Kai Hirschmann of Germany's Institute for Terrorism Research and Study told a Internet news site around the time of Scheider’s arrest.
“As ‘novices’ they try to be more religious than even the religious leaders,” Hirschmann added. “That often makes them especially fanatical and also especially dangerous.”
Other experts, however, disagree with that assessment.
“You can't say that conversion to Islam carries an explicit tendency toward becoming a radical,” Stefan Reichmuth, professor of Islamic Studies at the University of Bochum told DW-WORLD.DE.
Estimates of the number of German converts to Islam range between 15,000 and 80,000. But Germany's Muslim league says that, of them, only about 25 fit the description of being radical or dangerously fanatic.
http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,2144,3732626,00.html