German Officials Link Hijackers To Al Qaeda Group

By Peter Finn
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, September 27, 2001; Page A01

BERLIN, Sept. 26 -- German authorities have found evidence of contacts between a small group of hijackers who lived in Hamburg, including Mohamed Atta, and the al Qaeda terrorist network headed by Osama bin Laden, according to three senior German officials involved in intelligence and law enforcement.

"Through telephone, personal encounters or joint membership in Islamic clubs, Atta had links with particular individuals residing in Germany or transiting through Germany" who are suspected associates of bin Laden, a senior law enforcement official said in an interview.

The officials said that Atta and another Hamburg-based hijacker, Marwan Al-Shehhi, had some contact with a Syrian businessman, Mamoun Darkazanli. The Syrian was among 27 individuals and companies whose assets were frozen by the Bush administration earlier this week for alleged terrorist connections.

Darkazanli had power of attorney for a German bank account in the name of a man U.S. investigators believe was bin Laden's finance chief.

The officials cautioned that so far the evidence falls short of what they would need to prosecute the people who were in contact with the hijackers. They also said there is no evidence that the circle of bin Laden contacts helped plan the Sept. 11 attacks.

Still, in the past two weeks some of the best leads in getting to the bottom of the conspiracy have surfaced in Germany. In the city of Hamburg, Atta and two other alleged hijackers were members of what police call a terrorist cell that operated out of a second-floor apartment.

Atta is believed to be the hijacker who was at the controls of the first plane that struck the World Trade Center Sept. 11 in the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington.

The officials painted a picture of him as being in touch with a wide range of people in a shadowy world of terrorism. Among them, they said, were people whose names had surfaced in the investigations of a foiled millennium attack in the United States, and the planned detonation of a bomb in a marketplace in Strasbourg, France, on New Year's Eve 2000 or the following day. Investigators have previously linked terrorists involved in both plots to bin Laden.

"We have bits and pieces," said the senior intelligence official about the current probe of the hijackers. "We know [the source] but not all the details." The source, the official said, is bin Laden. "The magnitude of the attacks, the timeline, the coordination, all [of it points to] the fingerprint of bin Laden and those around him," said the law enforcement official.

Other than Darkazanli, officials declined to name the people with whom the hijackers had contact.The contacts were often indirect, they said: Atta had contact with one person who then had contact with a third person believed to be part of al Qaeda.

Possibly because the contacts were often indirect, the officials said, neither Atta nor Al-Shehhi nor a third Hamburg suspect, Ziad Jarrahi, came to the attention of German intelligence or police before Sept. 12, when they received their names from the FBI.

"The name Atta is a name the German security agencies did not have any knowledge of prior to Sept. 11," said the law enforcement official, who added that the same applied to Al-Shehhi and Jarrahi.

But in the interview, the officials said that before the Sept. 11 attacks, both German and other Western intelligence and security services had information that bin Laden planned to strike. We "had hints . . . [that] bin Laden would stage something really big, but we had no specific information," said the intelligence official.

One German official warned that "further attacks are planned" -- most probably in the United States, not Europe. "We are fully aware that it has not ended yet," said the government official. But he said there was no specific information about what form new attacks might take.

Al-Shehhi, 23, from the United Arab Emirates, was on the United Airlines flight that struck the second tower. The third hijacker, Jarrahi, was on the flight that crashed in Pennsylvania. All three, at various points in 1998 and 1999, shared the same apartment in Hamburg, where they were students.

The roots of the current investigation in Germany reach back to 1998 when Mamduh Mahmud Salim, a citizen of Sudan, was arrested in the German state of Bavaria on a U.S. warrant and extradited to the United States.

Salim, 43, is awaiting trial on charges that he was part of bin Laden's terrorist network and that he stabbed and wounded a guard in federal prison in Manhattan where he is being held.

Germany received evidence from the United States that Salim was bin Laden's finance chief, officials here said. The intelligence from the U.S. government also included information that Salim was planning "criminal acts" on German soil, the officials said.

As a result of the Salim case, the Bundeskriminalamt, the German equivalent of the FBI, created an "Analysis Project" to document Salim's links with other Islamic extremists in Germany, which in turn led to the scrutiny of more individuals.

The project did not lead to any prosecutions although it collected a trove of intelligence about a network of individuals and groups in Germany and abroad.

"At the early stages of this project, the FBI was invited to join in because the analysis of the information led to . . . Canada, the U.S. and other European countries such as Britain, France and Italy," said the law enforcement official.

Information generated by the project helped lead to the discovery of a bin Laden-sponsored plot to attack the United States during the 2000 millennium celebrations.

An Algerian named Ahmed Ressam was stopped in a car packed with bomb-making equipment attempting to enter Washington state at a remote border crossing in 1999 just before the celebrations. Ressam, who has admitted to undergoing terrorist training, including in chemical attacks, at a camp in Afghanistan, was convicted of smuggling and terrorism in a plot to bomb Los Angeles International Airport.

The Ressam investigation produced information, leads and names that led back to Europe, the officials said. Last December, German anti-terrorist police raided a Frankfurt apartment where they found weapons, including machine guns, and chemicals to make explosives as well as forged identification papers and cloned credit cards.

Police arrested two Iraqis, an Algerian and a French Muslim, but the suspected leader of the Frankfurt cell, an Algerian, Mohammad Bensakhria, escaped. He was later arrested in the Spanish city of Alicante, a city that Atta visited this July, according to Spanish police.

German officials said the Frankfurt group planned to attack a market in front of Strasbourg's cathedral.

Reexamining the information from the Analysis Project and the Ressam and Frankfurt cases, officials said they have generated information about Atta and his co-conspirators.

"We realize that the three [Hamburg] individuals had links and contacts with the millennium and Salim cases and people that crop up in the Analysis Project," said the law enforcement official. "Some of the people we came across in the investigations or through the Analysis Project, the intelligence community believes are within the inner circle or network" of bin Laden.

Darkazanli, the Syrian businessman, was questioned by German police last week, but he was quickly released. Efforts to reach him by telephone today were unsuccessful.

The Darkazanli Import-Export Co. shut down in 1997 only to reopen in August this year, according to German records. But at its listed address, an apartment, there was no sign of activity Wednesday, and neighbors said that in its first incarnation it appeared to be no more than a secondhand shop.

German officials, however, are investigating whether it was a conduit for money to the Hamburg cell and others.

The officials said that there was close cooperation between U.S. and European intelligence agencies. And the law enforcement official noted that his agency had provided office space for four FBI agents, with whom they share all evidence as well as investigative strategy.

"The network of Islamic terrorists has been anonymous or faceless," said the government official. But "this investigation will provide a face. And it will provide a lever that is much better than we had in the past."