By Tony Czuczka, The Associated Press
BERLIN (AP) -- Investigators on Thursday questioned an Iraqi under suspicion of channeling holy-war fighters to his country for suicide attacks against U.S. forces, on the heels of the capture of suspects in Hamburg and Milan also linked to similar activities.
Munich police arrested the man Tuesday at the city’s main train station fearing he was about to flee the country, prosecutor August Stern said. He said the suspect was served a warrant Thursday on charges of illegally smuggling Iraqis into Germany, but media reports said investigators also believe he belongs to the Islamic extremist group Ansar al-Islam.
Based in northern Iraq, the group is suspected of recruiting holy warriors for suicide missions in Iraq. U.S. officials believe it has links to al-Qaida.
The head of Germany’s Federal Criminal Office said there were links among groups whose members had been arrested recently, but he refused to elaborate.
“Almost all of the people arrested in recent times had contact among each other,” Ulrich Kersten told a news conference in Wiesbaden, where the agency is based.
In Hamburg, police acting on an Italian warrant arrested Abderrazak Mahdjoub, an Algerian believed to have links to al-Qaida, last Friday, following the arrests in Milan of a Tunisian and a Moroccan.
The Italian government said the arrests grew out of an investigation of a ring suspected of seeking recruits for a training camp run by Ansar al-Islam. Mahdjoub is suspected of being the ringleader.
Italian investigators have said Mahdjoub had contacts with two key Ansar al-Islam suspects arrested during raids in Italy in March and April -- Mohamed Daki, a Moroccan, and Ciise Maxamed Cabdullaah, a Somali.
The 29-year-old Munich suspect leads the group’s local cell and recently organized trips to Iraq for up to a dozen people for possible suicide bombing missions against U.S. troops, the Sueddeutsche Zeitung reported Thursday. A second suspect was at large, the paper said.
Authorities seized evidence during searches of apartments after his arrest, Stern said.
Federal prosecutors, who are responsible for terrorist cases, were examining whether to formally enter the investigation, spokeswoman Frauke Scheuten said.
Referring to the Munich arrest, Bavaria’s top security official, Guenter Beckstein, said Thursday that state authorities “have had an eye for a long time” on Ansar al-Islam. The group has about 100 supporters in Germany, according to Bavarian authorities.
German officials said they scrambled to arrest the Iraqi, whose name was not released by authorities, after the Bild newspaper reported Tuesday on revelations in Italy that a suspect jailed there had fingered a Munich cell as financing and organizing Ansar al-Islam’s recruitment.
“We had to make our grab sooner than we wanted,” Bavaria’s criminal police chief, Heinz Haumer, told Sueddeutsche Zeitung.
In Hamburg -- the city where three of the Sept. 11 suicide hijackers lived and studied -- a security official in charge of tracking extremists said authorities have about a dozen people under observation as potentially leading Islamic radicals.
Heino Vahldieck, head of the city’s Office for the Protection of the Constitution, indicated these suspects included Mahdjoub, who was arrested as a terror suspect in July but let go for lack of evidence until his renewed arrest on the Italian warrant.
Vahldieck expressed frustration at German laws that he said placed a high burden of proof on authorities.
“He was taken into custody but there was not enough evidence,” he said told The Associated Press in an interview at his office. “The level here in Germany is too high, that’s my impression.”
“We find it irritating that someone operated in Germany over a long period of time ... then comes an arrest warrant from Italy.”