Asia Times: The Hamburg, Germany connection


	September 22, 2001	atimes.com

Editorials

The Hamburg, Germany connection

What is it about the north German port city of Hamburg that seems to make it a predestined breeding ground and safe haven for terrorists?

It is now clear that at least three of the terrorists with suspected Osama bin Laden connections who participated in the September 11 attacks on the US lived "normal" student lives in the Hamburg area before their departure for America earlier this year. But German and US investigators assume and have concrete leads that possibly up to 13 suspects used, in particular, the Technical University of Harburg (Harburg is a working class suburb of Hamburg) as a base for planning and preparing their operations. University chancellor Joerg Severin confirmed last Monday that 7 of the 13 suspects contained in a list presented by the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the German Bundeskriminalamt (BKA), the federal criminal investigations office, had a record of study at the institution and that four of them were still listed on the present student register. One of those four had only recently paid DM300 in term fees.

A key individual in the TU Harburg cell was Mohammed Atta aka Mohamed El-Amir (all spellings as in the German records), 33, the alleged pilot of American Airlines Flight 11 - the first plane to hit the New York World Trade Center. He began work on a degree in urban planning in 1992 and completed his studies last year with a thesis on the development of an area of the northern Syrian trading city of Aleppo. Neither his thesis supervisor, Professor Dittmar Machule, nor fellow students ever noticed any radical political or religious tendencies. He was a devout Muslim, but that was all. "It is a cruel irony that he studied city planning and then destroyed a city," said Machule. But investigators now suspect that Atta used the "Islam AG", an Islam study group at the university which he founded, as a recruiting vehicle for his terrorist cell. An Egyptian, Atta - it has now been determined - had close links to the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, a terrorist group in the bin Laden orbit.

Atta's off-campus roommate was Marwan Al-Shehhi, 23, of the United Arab Emirates, who the FBI says was aboard United Airlines Flight 175, the second flight to hit the World Trade Center. In 1997, he began studying German at the University of Bonn under the name Marwan Lekrab. Later he transferred to Hamburg-Harburg. UAE authorities have connected him with bin Laden's Al-Qaida ("The Base") network.

The third Hamburg suspect is Ziad Samir Jarrah, 26. He studied aircraft construction for two years at the Hamburg College for Applied Sciences. While he apparently left Hamburg toward the end of 1999 to take flight training in the US, he remained on the student register through the summer term of this year. Like his fellow TU Harburg co-conspirators, he was described by fellow students as religious, but not fanatical, and he never attempted to convert others to his faith. Jarrah first came to Germany in 1996, to the eastern German university city of Greifswald. He was on the airliner that crashed in rural Pennsylvania.

While Atta, Al-Shehhi, and Jarrah are dead, a fourth terrorist suspect and TU Harburg student, Said Bahaji, 26, is presently unaccounted for and is believed to have fled to Pakistan. Bahaji is a German citizen of Moroccan origin and in early 1999 served in the German armed forces before being released due to ill health after a three month period. He is assumed to have been the logistics chief of the TU Harburg cell, responsible for organizing visas and apartments.

As the testimony of fellow students and teachers indicates, all four key Hamburg cell members were quiet, earnest students and never tried to impose their views on others; they were certainly no wide-eyed prosyletizers - the classic "sleepers" of intelligence parlance. It is also the case that about 20 percent of Harburg students are foreigners, many of Middle Eastern origin, and that the terrorists easily melded into this environment. It is nonetheless astonishing that no police or intelligence agencies ever in any way caught on to at least one of them - or the 30 or more sleeper cells German intelligence agencies now say may be active or have been active in the country.

And why Hamburg? The city has a long history of having bred and harbored terrorists. Ulrike Meinhof, the leader of the late 1960s/mid-70s "Baader-Meinhof Gang", self-described as the "Red Army Faction", was a Hamburg journalist for the left-radical magazine "konkret" before she engaged in her terrorist pursuits. The left radical scene has always been tolerated in Hamburg - admired even by the city's intelligentsia. Hamburg has dealt leniently for years with leftists and anarchists illegally occupying entire city blocks. It has been and continues to be a favorite city as well for drug addicts and drug dealers. This coming Sunday, local elections will be held in Hamburg. The so-called "red-green" coalition of social democrtas and environmentalists may well be voted out of power. A former judge, nicknamed "Judge No-Mercy", who styles himself as a tough crime fighter, is a formidable opponent and appeals to Hamburg citizens tired of living in Germany's crime capital. But if he wins, the judge's measures will come too late to have detected preparations for the worst terrorist act in history.

((c)2001 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact content@atimes.com for information on our sales and syndication policies.)