Print

Mail

wiki links

World Trade Center attack casts shadow in Europe

Abdel-Ghani Mzoudi, the Moroccan on trial in Germany for his alleged role in the Sept. 11 attacks. PHOTO: DPA

Wanted posters still flutter on police-station walls in Germany for two young Moroccan men believed to have been key members of the Hamburg terrorist cell that led the Sept. 11

attacks.

Over the past two years, German police have minutely examined every clue, and have put on trial two other Moroccan students for complicity in the attacks. Other groups of Islamic radicals in Germany have also felt the heat as police laid bare who knew who.

But the trail has grown cold. One of the two fugitives, Said Bahaji, 28, reportedly phoned his parents in Morocco in mid-August to say he was well, then hung up.

German investigators maintain that the Sept. 11 plot was devised in Hamburg by a group of eight students who went to Afghanistan to obtain helpers, funds and logistical aid from al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.

Three of the eight, including cell chief Mohammed Atta, died in the attacks. Mounir al-Motassadeq was jailed in February for 15 years. Alleged member Abdel-Ghani Mzoudi, 30, is currently on trial on 3,066 counts of assisting murder and membership in a terrorist organization.

Over the years, the count of Islamists in the multicultural city has been a fairly steady 1,500, with 200 of them rated as "militant."

Elsewhere in Germany, police have smashed the local branch of al-Tawhid, a Jordan-based radical group said to have al-Qaeda associations. Palestinian Shadi Abdallah, 26, is currently on trial for having been a member. He told the court he renounced its views.

In a setback, prosecutors were denied an arrest warrant for Christian G, 36, a German alleged to have had advance knowledge of the April 11, bombing last year that killed 21 people, 14 of them German tourists, outside a synagogue in Djerba, Tunisia.

Germany revised its anti-terrorism legislation after the attacks to give the government authority to outlaw faith-based groups that had previously been able to claim freedom-of-religion exemption.

The powers were not initially used against Al Qaeda, but another thorn in Berlin's side: Metin Kaplan. The imam and his 1,100-strong Caliphate State movement want to overthrow secular government in Turkey. Berlin now hopes to deport him.

In April this year, despite the furious row over Iraq, the US State Department praised both France and Germany for their efforts in the war on terrorism.

Paris was commended for its assistance in the investigations of Reid and of Zacarias Moussaoui, a French citizen of Moroccan descent who is in US custody on charges of involvement in the Sept. 11 attacks.

Because of a series of bloody terrorist attacks on its soil in the early 1990s, France was not unprepared for the stricter security measures that needed to be imposed after September 2001.

However, two unrelated events more than one year apart added new urgency to its anti-terrorist efforts.

The first was the December 2001 attempt by Briton Richard Reid to destroy an American Airlines plane over the Atlantic by igniting explosives he had concealed in his shoe.

The second was the naming of ambitious, media-savvy Nicolas Sarkozy as France's interior minister after the right-wing victory in the June general elections last year.

Reid had boarded the plane in Paris, and had spent time in the French capital planning his coup. Several months later, a number of people were arrested on suspicion of collaborating with the so-called shoe bomber and of links to Al Qaeda.

Shortly after Sarkozy came into office, French police made a series of lightning raids in the greater Paris area, arresting more than two dozen people suspected of planning terrorist acts in France or elsewhere, or of links to the Tunisia synagogue attack.

Britain has also kept close tabs on its Islamic radicals. The heightened security has not always been welcomed.

From time to time press reports tell of heightened terror alerts around London, and drills have been conducted on the London underground rail system, for example, but phlegmatic Londoners have tended to go about their business as usual.

Most Britons believe their security services are better trained and more effective than those in the US, but the government is not being complacent.
This story has been viewed 3286 times.