By Michael Brocker
The Philadelphia Inquirer
A mosque in Hamburg, Germany, was the original staging post for the 9/11 terror attacks. Now, nine years after al-Qaeda’s carnage, the city fears Islamic jihadists are trying to make a foothold again.
“Hamburg is the center of Islamic extremism in Germany, and that concerns us most,” Wolfgang Bosbach, chairman of the parliament’s home affairs committee, said this week, days before the remembrance of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in New York.
Mohamed Atta was the ringleader of the al-Qaeda cell that was planning the attacks. He had frequented a Hamburg mosque and recruited other jihadists to help him carry out the plan, authorities say.
Police have kept surveillance on the prayer house, now called Taiba Mosque, since the 2001 attacks, and just last month, they said they had accumulated enough evidence to close it. But officials are still worried that jihad followers are still in the neighborhoods, working to recruit followers.
According to Germany’s Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA), an estimated 400 jihadists live in Germany, with up to 120 in Hamburg. The BKA says the number is increasing.
Hamburg, a diverse port city, is an easy place for jihadists to blend in and offers an effective recruiting environment, officials say. Twenty-eight percent of the 1.8 million residents have non-German roots. “It’s the new generation of Mohamed Attas,” Bosbach said.
After the last two years of intense surveillance, security officials compiled enough evidence and closed the mosque Aug. 9.
“Young Muslim men were drawn to the mosque - they met there, prayed, chatted together, became radicalized,” said Manfred Murck, deputy director of Hamburg’s intelligence service. He says that “the mosque remained popular for Muslims because it has the aura of the 9/11 assassins.”
The leading imam at the mosque was Mamoun Darkazanli, a German Syrian accused of being al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden’s contact in Germany. Darkazanli was arrested on a warrant accusing him of involvement with al-Qaeda and alleging that he was a bin Laden financier. But his extradition was blocked by Germany’s high court and he was eventually released by prosecutors. He is now a free man, living on welfare in Hamburg.
The Hamburg mosque, though now closed, still leaves Germans with the fear of “homegrown terrorism” - the threat of radicalized converts to Islam and young immigrants turning to extremists. “This is a big issue, and we still don’t know how to handle this right,” Bosbach said.
Because of an expanded welfare system and fairly liberal citizenship laws, Germany still is a “popular place for these people,” he said.
Since 2009, the BKA has noticed rising numbers of trips taken by Islamists between Germany and the Afghan-Pakistan border. According to BKA President Joerg Ziercke, at least 70 jihadists have undergone paramilitary training in camps there. Authorities are not sure where they have traveled, or where they are now.
After a controversial debate in parliament, members changed the law this summer, allowing authorities to deny entry to any Muslims believed to be linked to extremist actions.
But it is difficult to confirm who is linked to jihad and who is not. A group of 11 people who met at the Taiba mosque in Hamburg and were under surveillance disappeared in June, according to security officials, with the goal of training at an extremist camp. One of them, German Syrian Rami M., was later detained in Pakistan and sent back to Germany and jailed. Others, most of them with a German passport, are still on the run, officials say.
Recently, American troops in Kabul detained a Syrian man known as Ahmad S., who spoke extensively about attacks planned by jihadists in Germany and other parts of Europe. German prosecutors found a link to Hamburg. Ahmad S. has close contacts to Mounir el-Motassadeq - also a conspirator in 9/11 who is now sitting in a German jail, sentenced to 15 years.
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