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Three suspected hijackers were part of a group of fundamentalists who attended a technical university in Hamburg.
©New York Times
© St. Petersburg Times, published September 17, 2001
HAMBURG, Germany -- To the embarrassment of German security officials, a small technical university on the southern edge of this wealthy port city unknowingly harbored a cell of Islamic fundamentalists, a group that included at least three of the suspected hijackers who launched and perished in Tuesday's terrorist attacks.
Less than 36 hours after the assault, German police received a list from the FBI of 13 people suspected of links to the terror. Since early Thursday, about 100 German investigators, joined late last week by an unknown number of FBI agents, have scoured 14 Hamburg apartments and detained about 12 people for questioning.
German police, who are accustomed to monitoring foreign extremists, are providing little information. "The investigation is so difficult because these were people who never caused a stir," said the federal prosecutor, Kay Nehm.
The latest annual report of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution identified 58,800 members of "foreign extremist organizations" living in Germany. Of those, 31,450 were said to be Islamic extremists, most Turkish or Kurdish. About 5.5 percent are Arab and 1.7 percent are from Iran, according to the 2000 edition of the report.
In Hamburg, a city of 1.7-million with about 80,000 Muslims, there are about 2,450 extremist foreigners, only 270 identified in the report as Iranian or Arab. According to the report, the Palestinian group Hamas does significant fundraising here, and Osama bin Laden's Al-Qaida organization has individual members, relying "on personal contacts and a global network structure."
On Dec. 26, 2000, the German police announced a blow against bin Laden, arresting four men in Frankfurt on terrorism charges and seizing an arsenal of rifles, handguns, machine guns, homemade detonators, a grenade, false documents and a quantity of potassium permanganate for potential bombmaking. The police, who passed on information to Britain and France that led to arrests in London, said the men had received training in bin Laden's camps.
The current investigation is focused on the Technical University of Hamburg-Harburg. The Hamburg weekly newspaper Die Zeit said in a special edition to be published today that as many as four more suspects on the FBI list may have been registered at the university. The chancellor, Joerg Severin, found seven of the 13 names on the FBI list when police asked him to look into the university's files late Wednesday night.
Three of those names are Arabs who died on three of the four hijacked planes, and more details about their careful double lives here continue to emerge.
In interviews with people who knew him here, the apparent leader of the cell, Mohammed Mohammed Al-Amir Awad Al-Sayed Atta, emerges as the most compelling figure. Age 33 when he launched his deadly mission Tuesday, he was legally registered here from 1992 and appeared to be a devoted student of civil engineering and urban planning until two years ago, when he started an Islamic prayer group at the university and apparently began to recruit for fundamentalist causes.
His apartment, at 54 Marienstrasse, became a center for other Arabs, and neighbors say Atta and his friends spent a lot of time at a nearby cafe, making long distance calls from public phones.
According to his professor, Dittmar Machule, and two close German friends, who spent almost three months with Atta in Cairo in 1995, he was a man of deep intelligence and religious belief who began to grow very angry.
Ralph Bodenstein, one of the friends invited to Cairo, where he said Atta's father was a well-off lawyer, said Atta became more open and relaxed in Egypt but also increasingly angry about Western policy toward the Middle East.
"He was not anti-western in a cultural sense," said Bodenstein, in a telephone interview from Beirut, where he is doing doctoral research. "He was shocked by the Oslo process and the role of the United Nations and the United States and the European powers in the Gulf War. It depressed a lot of people, that this war was being waged for Western interests, and that even their own government in Egypt was selling out the interests of the people to gain material advantages."