The German government Tuesday made a public admission of failure in allowing the plotters of the Sept. 11 carnage to slip through undetected.
The move came as the US authorities for the first time stated openly that the northern port of Hamburg had been a central base of operations in the planning of the attacks in the US.
Sitting beside the US Attorney-General John Ashcroft, at a joint press conference in Washington, Germany's interior minister, Otto Schily, said: "We must say we failed to see it." He added: "But to be very open-minded, we altogether failed ... We have to re-examine our security system."
Mohammed Atta, who is alleged to have flown the first of the airliners to hit the World Trade Center, and two of the other suspected hijack pilots lived and studied in the city, along with three men wanted in connection with the attack.
Ashcroft said: "It is clear that Hamburg served as a central base of operations for these six individuals and their part in the planning of the Sept. 11 attack."
Otto Schily's humiliating acknowledgement came as his investigators back in Germany revealed an apparently significant development in the global operation to clamp down on Islamist terrorism.
A suspected Islamist terrorist was arrested and removed from a jet liner as it was about to take off from Frankfurt airport, police said Tuesday. A statement from the office of Germany's chief prosecutor said the man had since been put under formal investigation in connection with "serious crimes such as murder and manslaughter."
German frontier guards boarded an Iran Air flight to Tehran after the discovery of several suspicious items in the man's luggage. The prosecutor's office said they included a nuclear, biological and chemical warfare protection suit and parts that could have been used to make a detonator.
The arrest was only revealed Tuesday after the publication of reports in two local newspapers. The seriousness of the crimes under investigation suggested the man was suspected of a great deal more than just setting off to join the Taliban's struggle in Afghanistan.
The prosecutor's office identified the suspected as Harun A, aged 29. But it added that he was a Turkish citizen and a leading member of a Cologne-based Islamist organization. Because of Germany's restrictive immigration laws, many of its Turkish immigrants remain Turkish citizens.
The statement said that he was being sought actively by investigators at the time of his arrest.
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