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Posted on 09/29/2002 3:48:40 PM PDT by knighthawk
Muslims are on edge and suspicion reigns in city where Mohammed Atta studied, prayed and plotted the 9/11 hijackings
HAMBURG THE SPIRITUAL home of the Sept. 11 plotters is off a dark stairway on the second floor of a drab building in the heart of a neighbourhood where hookers and drug pushers rule the streets at night.
A dozen worshippers have answered the call to prayer on a cool evening, kneeling on the green and white striped carpet of the Al Quds mosque, where Mohammad Atta and his cell were inspired by hate-filled sermons.
It's a small turnout, even for a room that can fit only about 100 people. But it's not the size of the mosque's congregation that continues to concern Hamburg police. It's the militancy of its convictions.
"We have nothing to say to journalists," says one of the mosque's leaders, a grave-looking young man in white robes. "Leave now."
At the bottom of the stairs, a few worshippers mingle at the entrance, slightly chattier.
"I told my wife, `If I were 20 years younger, I would have gone to fight the Americans in Afghanistan,'" says a Moroccan man with white hair and beard, segueing into a rant about Jews controlling the world.
A younger man complains about being detained overnight by police and questioned for a break-in committed while he was at a party with dozens of alibis.
"They just harass us because we come to this mosque," he says in French. "What they don't understand is that there are those who cause trouble, and there are those who just want to work and feed their families."
A year after 9/11, Hamburg is a city where suspicion reigns.
Its residents have elected the first right-wing municipal government in 44 years. Swept to power on an anti-immigrant platform, the new city fathers are busy dismantling services for immigrants, such as an ombudsman's office for foreigners, which they blame for helping extremists take root in this northern port city.
Still stinging from their failure to detect the hatching of the most spectacular crime of the new century, police are tracking anyone who had contact with the deadly Al Qaeda cell that used Hamburg as its base.
And the city's 130,000 Muslims are on edge.
"We are all against these terrorists," says Abdul Matin Tatari, whose family was detained when police raided his textile firm three weeks ago.
"But many people who have nothing to do with this whole thing are being drawn into it just because they had contact with them. Next thing you know, the baker where Atta bought his bread is going to be arrested."
A year-old dragnet across Europe has resulted in the arrest and questioning of more than 200 people suspected of ties to Al Qaeda in Germany, Italy, Spain, England and the Netherlands.
The sweeps have disrupted the European branch of Osama bin Laden's network, but police say the extremist organization has not been neutralized.
"I think there's no question we will have other attacks in Western countries in the future," says Andreas Croll, deputy chief of the Hamburg police counterterrorism unit. "The question is when we will have them, and where."
Nowhere was Al Qaeda more developed than in Hamburg, where security services now classify 1,500 Muslims as extremists under surveillance.
"Our definition is that they see the Qur'an and its religious laws as more important than democracy and the state's laws," says Manfred Murck, deputy director of Hamburg's Protector of the Constitution office, the intelligence agency that monitors extremist groups in Germany.
The agency pays special attention to 100 people who had contacts with members of Atta's cell and are presumed ready to fight for their beliefs.
The Hamburg cell was made up of seven key players. Three of them piloted hijacked planes into New York's World Trade Center and the Pentagon — Atta, Marwan Al-Shehhi and Ziad Samir Jarrah. Four are suspected of giving logistical support for the attack — Said Bahaji, Zakariya Essabar, Ramzi Binalshibh and Mounir El Motassadeq.
Bahaji and Essabar left Hamburg shortly before the Sept. 11 attacks and are wanted on international arrest warrants.
Binalshibh, originally from Yemen, was arrested two weeks ago after a gunfight with Pakistani police in Karachi. Accused of being one of the main planners of the 9/11 attacks, the 30-year-old was Atta's roommate in the Hamburg apartment they called "The House of Followers." Police suspect he was to have been one of the hijackers, had his requests for a U.S. visa not been denied.
El Motassadeq, a 28-year-old Moroccan citizen, is the only member of Atta's cell in the custody of German police. Accused of sending money to finance flight lessons for cell members in the United States, he was charged last month with more than 3,000 counts of accessory to murder and membership in a terrorist organization. He is expected to go to trial this fall.
Two other men are suspected of playing key roles in recruiting and financing the cell.
Mohammed Haydar Zammar, 42, who was born in Syria and immigrated to Germany at age 10, allegedly recruited Atta for Al Qaeda's "holy war." Zammar, who denies any involvement, is under arrest in Syria, where police are co-operating with U.S. security authorities to pry information out of him.
Mamoun Darkazanli, also a Syrian, is accused by U.S. authorities of being an Al Qaeda financier. The United States wants him extradited, but he continues to live freely in Hamburg, where police say they don't have enough evidence to arrest him.
Germany's chief federal prosecutor, Kay Nehm, says most of the cell members came to Germany as students from various Arab countries between 1992 and 1997, getting to know each other at Hamburg's Technical University and the Al Quds mosque.
"All the members of this cell shared the same religious convictions, an Islamic lifestyle, a feeling of being out of place in unfamiliar cultural surroundings," Nehm said when announcing the charges against El Motassedeq.
"At the centre of this stood the hatred of world Jewry and the United States," Nehm added, describing Atta, a 34-year-old Egyptian, as the group's mastermind.
By October, 1999, Nehm said, the group decided to "actively participate in jihad through terrorist attacks on America to kill a large number of people."
A month later, Atta, Al-Shehhi and Jarrah travelled to Afghanistan to train in Al Qaeda's camps and the other cell members followed within months. According to Nehm, they finalized their plot in meetings in Spain and Malaysia between January, 2000, and July, 2001.
German security officials argue that they were hampered in investigating the Hamburg cell by a post-World War II security structure imposed by the Allied powers. To ensure there never again would be an all-powerful Gestapo, Germany's security services were decentralized and divided into what today are 16 units, each with separate powers and jurisdictions.
The Protector of the Constitution intelligence agency conducts surveillance but doesn't have the power to question suspects, search apartments, plant listening devices or make arrests. It passes information on to other security forces and hopes they follow through.
Before 9/11, counterterrorism work focused on extremist groups from the far left and right.
Murck's agency also struggled under cutbacks and staff reductions imposed after the fall of the Soviet Union. When Sept. 11 shook the world, only one agent was working on Al Qaeda links in Hamburg.
"We knew there were Islamic militants in Hamburg," says Murck, "but the assumption was that they used Hamburg as a kind of resting place where they could be safe from police in their own countries.
"Perhaps they had sympathies with Hamas or Islamic Jihad or Hezbollah, and we knew they had contacts with violent organizations in their own countries, but it wasn't our assumption that they were plotting here. Our assumption was that they were here just to hide.
"So neither we, nor other security services, gave these groups a high priority. Sept. 11 came as a very bad surprise."
Before the attacks, not one member of Atta's cell was in the agency's files. But police did have indications that something was up.
In December, 2000, German police arrested five men accused of planning to blow up an outdoor market in front of the Cathedral of Notre Dame in the French border city of Strasbourg.
Their trial, one of the first major prosecutions of a cell linked to Al Qaeda, is expected to continue for several more months in Frankfurt.
Before the Strasbourg arrests, security services bugged Zammar's telephone and heard him talk about the apartment at 54 Marienstrasse, where Atta and other members of the Hamburg cell lived since 1998. But the surveillance of Zammar was dropped for lack of evidence and the residents of the apartment were not investigated.
In 1998, German police also suspected that Hamburg resident Darkazanli had links to one of Al Qaeda's bankrollers. But his surveillance was also dropped for lack of evidence.
Since the 9/11 attacks, German police have taken a more muscled approach when surveillance fails to result in charges.
In early July, after three months of surveillance, police launched a dawn raid on the Attawhid Bookstore and several apartments, a short walk from the Al Quds mosque. They moved in after monitoring what police describe as a ceremony in the store's back room, during which men pledged themselves to "martyrdom."
Seven of the men were arrested but released 24 hours later. Among them was Abdel Ghani Mazoudi, 29, a Moroccan who was one of the signatories to Atta's will.
"There was an assumption that they might develop a new Hamburg cell," says Murck. "But the concrete evidence of a terrorist attack wasn't found."
Adds Croll, the chief investigator in the case: "We sent them a message, a warning: What you're doing isn't right."
Authorities are now considering whether the men can be deported.
Abdel Safer, the 32-year-old owner of the bookstore, denies that a martyrdom ceremony took place in his shop and that he sold videotapes of hate-filled sermons.
He said the only reason the men were detained is that they all attended Said Bahaji's wedding at the Al Quds mosque, a videotape of which is now in the hands of police.
Three weeks ago, German police raided the offices and warehouses of two textile companies north of Hamburg, owned by Abdul Matin Tatari, a Syrian-born German.
Tatari, his wife and two sons are suspected of links to Atta's cell, of using their textile-trading companies to smuggle Islamic militants into Germany and of activities that "contribute to the `holy war' of violent fundamental Islamists," chief prosecutor Nehm said in a statement.
According to Murck, the investigation has raised questions about a possible "Syrian connection" to the cell that carried out the 9/11 attacks. One of the textile firm's investors is Mohammed Majid Said, whom Murck describes as a former high-ranking member of Syria's intelligence services.
According to the German magazine Der Spiegel, Said is a former head of Syrian intelligence and now a member of Syria's National Security Council.
The magazine said German investigators believe Said may have been using the firm to monitor the activities of radical exiled Syrians and members of Al Qaeda's Hamburg cell.
Murck describes the textile-trading firm as part of a larger network that included members of Atta's Hamburg cell.
"So who else was involved in that network — like the Syrian intelligence services — is one of the questions we have," he says.
Tatari, the 59-year-old owner of Tatex Trading GmbH and Tatari Design, agreed to talk to The Star at his warehouse and office in Rethwisch, a town about 70 kilometres north of Hamburg.
As we speak, a tractor-trailer with the Tatex name is being loaded with textiles. Suits jam a showroom, where a client is having one fitted.
Tatari rejects suspicions against him and his family, saying he hasn't even hired a lawyer, convinced that the police investigation will amount to nothing.
He acknowledges that his 27-year-old son, Hadi, knew members of the Hamburg Al Qaeda cell, including Atta, because they studied together at Hamburg's Technical University. But he says his son never suspected them of any wrongdoing.
Tatari, who settled in Germany 40 years ago and married a German woman, says he helped more than 100 Arabs obtain German visas in 2000 and 2001. He says they were friends and business clients, or their relatives, and adds: "It's the German government that gives out visas, not us."
He also acknowledges that Zammar, described by Hamburg investigators as a key recruiter for Al Qaeda, worked at his firm during three brief stints. When Zammar was 12, Tatari says, he tutored the boy in math.
The German media are full of stories that describe Zammar, the father of six children, as a battle-hardened purveyor of jihad. He reportedly underwent weapons training in camps in Afghanistan, fighting for an Al Qaeda-linked warlord during Afghanistan's civil war and later with Arab mujahideen in Bosnia.
It's an image that makes Tatari laugh.
"Zammar is a big man; he weighs 150 kilos. He can't even run 10 metres — how do you want him to fight?
"We're talking about a man who is really simple-minded. He couldn't organize anything even if he wanted to. He's lazy.
"Yes, he had radical ideas, but he's like a child with a big mouth. He would have liked to be a terrorist, but it's just nonsense. If he had known anything about the Sept. 11 plot, it would never have happened. He was such a bigmouth he would have told everybody."
The suspect's father, 71-year-old Abdel Zammar, says his son once "had contact with young people who drank beer" but became strictly religious in his late teens.
"From that time on, he never drank alcohol," the senior Zammar says by telephone. "But once I saw him smoking and smacked him in the face.
According to his father, Zammar trained as a car mechanic but rarely worked, never once mentioned Al Qaeda and never went to Afghanistan to fight or train for battle.
"He always spoke his mind and he always told the truth. He would say things like, `I don't like the Americans. They're all big liars and they don't do anything about human rights. Look at what is happening in Palestine. The Jews are allowed to have atomic bombs and all kinds of weapons, but the Americans don't care. They just pick on Iraq.' He would get very angry."
Zammar attended the Al Quds and Al Muhadjirin mosques and often voiced his opinions there after prayers. According to his father, Moroccan police arrested him last year when he went to Morocco to divorce one of his two wives. Moroccan authorities then transferred him to Syria with American consent.
At the Al Muhadjirin mosque, not far from the Al Quds mosque, a Moroccan guarding the basement entrance says Zammar often attended but never made inflammatory speeches.
Moments later, the mosque's deputy director, Azam Irschid, denies that Zammar even attended.
When a reporter notes the contradiction, the Moroccan sneers: "Are you calling us liars?"
Additional Sandro Contenta articles (good stuff here)
http://www.thestar.com/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Render&c=Page&cid=968332188854&ce=Columnist&colid=972859096039
Interesting, with all the media hoopla over the NY seven makes one wonder how lax security is in Germany and what they are willing to overlook.
Read that article and you might get an answer. It's in Italy, but it's the same all over in Europe. And mind you: Germany is about the only country in Europe who is activly shutting down islamic 'charites' and other extremist organizations.
Read that article and you might get an answer. It's in Italy, but it's the same all over in Europe. And mind you: Germany is about the only country in Europe who is activly shutting down islamic 'charites' and other extremist organizations.
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