The hijacking conspiracy spawned in this northern port city likely was broader and deeper than previously reported, according to investigative files amassed by German authorities since Sept. 11, 2001.
At least five and possibly seven presumed Al Qaeda operatives appear to have fled Hamburg in the days before Sept. 11, tracing a hurried route through Turkey, Pakistan or the United Arab Emirates to what they believed was the sanctuary of an Al Qaeda camp in Afghanistan.
Up to a dozen others who enjoyed close relationships with the hijackers stayed behind, possibly hoping to resume their pre-Sept. 11 lives as students or small businessmen while avoiding the scrutiny of police.
Of the previously known members of the Hamburg Al Qaeda contingent, Mohamed Atta, Marwan al-Shehhi and Ziad Jarrah died when the planes they piloted slammed into the twin towers of the World Trade Center and a Pennsylvania field. As has also long been known, three of their co-conspirators, Said Bahaji, Ramzi Binalshibh and Zacariya Essabar, left Hamburg in haste in the two weeks before the hijackings were carried out.
Of the alleged stay-behinds linked to Al Qaeda, Mounir El Motassadeq, a former engineering student, this month became the first person convicted of providing the hijackers logistical aid.
But visa and travel records and airplane passenger manifests compiled by police indicate that as Bahaji boarded a Turkish Airlines flight from Hamburg to Istanbul on Sept. 3, 2001, he was not alone. Also on board were two men who identified themselves to the airline as Abdellah Hosayni and Ammar Moula–as it turned out, not their real names. Using a stolen French passport and a phony Belgian one, the pair, who had been living in a Hamburg shelter for asylum-seekers, bought their tickets with cash on Aug. 14, nearly a month before the hijackings and 10 days before the hijackers made their first flight reservations for Sept. 11.
German authorities believe the two mystery men were actually Algerians Ismail Ben Mrabete and Ahmed Taleb. At 47 and 48, both were considerably older than the members of the Hamburg cell. Police say little is known of their backgrounds. According to a police informant, however, Taleb and Ben Mrabete later turned up at the same Afghan Al Qaeda camp as Bahaji and Essabar.
Investigators later discovered that Taleb had been in e-mail contact with Abu Zubaydah, who is believed to be Al Qaeda’s third-highest official until his capture in Pakistan last March. The passenger manifests for Bahaji’s Sept. 3 flight from Hamburg to Istanbul also show that Bahaji was sitting next to a man identified by the airline as Patrick Joia. Elsewhere on the plane was a passenger recorded as Mohammed Juia. Because each of those two men listed a common address and a father with the same first name on their Pakistani visa applications, police believe the two are brothers and that their family name is Joya.
The Joyas, who also purchased their tickets in Hamburg, claimed on their visa applications, dated Aug. 13, that they were Afghan nationals headed for Quetta, Pakistan, a popular jumping-off point for Afghanistan. Bahaji and the first two mystery men, Taleb and Ben Mrabete, also journeyed on to Quetta–Bahaji by plane on Sept. 5, and the two others by bus later the same day, records show.
Before leaving Karachi, Bahaji, Taleb and Ben Mrabete spent the night in Room 318 at the Karachi Embassy Hotel. Also registered at that hotel was Mohammed Belfatmi, an Algerian extremist from the Tarragona region of Spain and the fifth Al Qaeda suspect besides Bahaji aboard the flight from Istanbul to Karachi.
3-day meeting in Spain
Spanish police reportedly believe Belfatmi played a role in arranging the three-day meeting that brought Mohamed Atta and Ramzi Binalshibh to Spain in July 2001, eight weeks before the hijackings.
Investigators say the meeting, which was probably a final strategy session for the plot, may have been attended by Imad Eddin Barakat Yarkas, the alleged Al Qaeda leader in Spain. Barakat, whose phone number was found by German police in Bahaji’s personal directory, told a Spanish judge after Sept. 11 that he knew a man in Hamburg named Mohammed Joya. Barakat is in jail in Madrid, accused of complicity in the Sept. 11 hijackings, largely on the strength of a telephone call he received from an unknown person a few days before the attacks advising him that “they” had “entered the field of aviation.”
Bahaji, Taleb, Ben Mrabete, the Joya brothers and Belfatmi remain unaccounted for. So does Karl Herweg, although he apparently did not flee Hamburg with the others. Indeed, police in Hamburg have concluded that “Karl Herweg” doesn’t exist. That alone qualifies him as one of the most important figures in the continuing mystery that is Sept. 11.
Three weeks before Sept. 11, 2001, when the Minnesota FBI arrested Zacarias Moussaoui, later charged with conspiracy in the hijackings, agents found among his possessions the number of a German cell phone. In Germany, as elsewhere in Europe, purchasers of mobile phones must produce a passport or other official identification. It was a simple task for police to discover that the phone bearing the number in Moussaoui’s address book was registered to one Karl Herweg of Duesseldorf.
When police checked the records of calls made from Herweg’s number in the weeks before Sept. 11, they uncovered a trove of information. Among others, Herweg had called phones used by Mounir El Motassadeq, Zacariya Essabar and Mohammed Haydar Zammar, a veteran Al Qaeda operative in Hamburg. There were other suspicious calls: to a number belonging to “Mohammed R.,” identified by prosecutors as key Sept. 11 suspect, and to a satellite phone of the type favored by Al Qaeda chieftains in Afghanistan before the fall of the Taliban.
Herweg, it appeared, was plugged in to what was going on in Hamburg. But when the federal police asked the Duesseldorf police to pick him up, they were told there was nobody by that name at the address where the phone was registered. In fact, there was nobody by that name in Duesseldorf. In the house next to Herweg’s bogus address lived a couple with the same last name. But the couple informed police that they had no children and had never heard of Karl Herweg.
Hoping its owner would resurface after Sept. 11, police placed a tap on Herweg’s phone, documents show. When no new calls were made or received by early November, the surveillance was discontinued. Bad timing. Police later learned from the cellular provider that at least one additional call had been placed after that date. Unlike Bahaji, Essabar and Binalshibh, who was captured in September in Pakistan, Herweg seems to have remained behind in Germany following Sept. 11.
E-mails to flight schools
Police admit they may never learn who Karl Herweg is, and he is not the only phantom who inhabits the Sept. 11 archive. In March 2000, not long after the Afghanistan visit where Atta, Binalshibh, al-Shehhi and Jarrah were enlisted as prospective pilots in Al Qaeda’s hijacking plot, Atta began sending e-mails to flying schools in the U.S.
“We are a small group (2-3) of young men from different arab countries,” the e-mails read. “Now we are living in Germany since a while for study purposes. We would like to start training for the career of airline professional pilots. In this field we haven’t yet any knowledge, but we are ready to undergo an intensive training program.”
All the e-mails were sent from the same Hotmail account, records show. In some of the e-mails, the owner of the account was identified as “M. Atta.” In others, however, it was “Mahmoud Ben Hamad.” Police say they have no clue to the identity of Mahmoud Ben Hamad. As investigators scrub the streets and alleys of Hamburg in search of Sept. 11 accomplices, several other suspects have come to their attention.
“Many persons had contact with [the hijackers] and helped them, whether they knew it or not,” a senior intelligence official here said. “But it seems probable to me that there were some more people who knew they were planning something.”
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One focus of the investigation, documents show, was a 33-year-old Yemeni whose Hamburg telephone number, like Karl Herweg’s, was in a notebook seized by the FBI from Zacarias Moussaoui. In addition, the Yemeni’s address was found on a business card recovered from the wreckage of United Airlines Flight 93, which crashed short of its target in a Pennsylvania field. The other side of the card bore the address of a relative of Ziad Jarrah, who is believed to have piloted that plane. Ramzi Binalshibh used the Yemeni’s address and phone number when he applied for a German bank account and for the U.S. visa that, had it been granted, would have allowed him to join Atta, Jarrah and al-Shehhi at flying schools in Florida.
Frequent phone contact
In the weeks before Said Bahaji fled Hamburg, he and the Yemeni were in frequent touch by telephone. But when the man was questioned by police after Sept. 11, he denied knowing Bahaji.
“He probably did not tell the truth,” a prosecutor’s report states, “because he wanted to play down the fact that he was closely in touch with suspected members of the terrorist organization. His attitude in the interrogation enhances the suspicion that in his own view there are good reasons for a denial of those links.”
Also suspected of aiding the hijackers is a Moroccan man who moved to Hamburg to study engineering at the same university attended by hijackers Atta and al-Shehhi. According to the prosecutors, the Moroccan was in close contact with a half-dozen of the hijackers and their supporters, with whom he was employed in the paint shop at an auto manufacturing plant. As police dug deeper, they found circles within circles. Like Atta, the Moroccan had used a university computer to seek information about pilot training in the U.S. A search of the Yemeni’s apartment yielded the Moroccan’s university registration certificate–bearing Mohamed Atta’s address–and an address book with Said Bahaji’s telephone number. When Said Bahaji’s apartment was searched, it revealed legal documents in the Moroccan’s name.
From Mounir El Motassadeq, the Moroccan had received more than $1,600 in bank transfers that, police say, he is unable to explain. Letters were also found among his possessions containing references to dying “for Allah.”
Another suspect
Yet another person suspected of supporting the hijackers, according to the German federal prosecutor, is a 25-year-old Jordanian, a close friend of Ziad Jarrah since both were students in Griefswald , in eastern Germany, during the mid-1990s. After moving to Hamburg, the Jordanian registered his address with police as Mohamed Atta’s apartment. The hijackers also shared bank accounts and cell phones with the Jordanian, who according to police underwent the same radical transformation as Atta and his followers.
As Ramzi Binalshibh fled Germany six days before Sept. 11, he made three calls from the Duesseldorf airport. One was to Saeed Alghamdi, one of the 19 hijackers who already were in the U.S. The second call was to the Jordanian. When the Jordanian, on a visit to Munich, was summoned to Hamburg for questioning, the prosecutors say he “cried in the train like a child,” explaining to a friend that “there is something I have not told you about.”
“This conversation,” the prosecutors conclude, “makes us assume that the accused knew more about the background of the plot and, thus, suffers from an internal conflict.”
As is the case with Motassadeq, sentenced to 15 years in a German prison, the evidence against the Yemeni, the Moroccan, the Jordanian and several others like them is largely circumstantial. Mathias Krauss, one of the German prosecutors working on the Sept. 11 case, declined last week to say whether any of the suspects would be charged in light of the Motassadeq verdict.
“We are not finished with our investigation,” he said.
On Saturday, chief prosecutor Kay Nehm announced that Abdelghani Mzoudi, a 29-year-old Moroccan student who shared an apartment with Atta, Essabar and Binalshibh, would soon be indicted for having aided the hijackers, the charge on which Motassadeq was convicted.
Before his arrest last October, Mzoudi told a German magazine he was “absolutely shocked when I heard that Atta was supposed to have done the attack. I can’t imagine that a Muslim does something like that. A Muslim does not kill children, old people and women.”
But Andreas Croll, the deputy commander of the state security unit for the Hamburg police, said, “We know today that there are groups in Germany which have contact with Al Qaeda. We also have some individuals for which we have proof of the fact that they have contact with Al Qaeda.”
The difficulty police face is sorting out the terrorists from those who merely express extreme, though not illegal, religious and political views and who have non-criminal contacts with terrorist suspects. There are 130,000 Muslims in the cosmopolitan city of Hamburg, of whom police have identified some 1,500 as militant fundamentalists. Of those, about 100 are considered worth watching closely because of their contacts with Al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations.
“We know many more people than before who are part of a network,” another senior police official said. “Those are the persons we try to care about.”
No ID cards
From time to time officials have discussed closing the radical Al Quds Mosque in downtown Hamburg, where the hijackers met and prayed, but have decided that allowing the mosque to remain open provides police a wider window on the radical Islamic community. Many of those being watched hail not from the Middle East but from the Muslim countries of north Africa. Whether they are members of an Al Qaeda cell, the police official continued, was “not so important for me. You do not have an ID card that says `I’m a member of Al Qaeda.’
“The problem is, What is a cell? What does it mean to belong to Al Qaeda? More important is their ideology. Did they go to a training camp in Afghanistan? The largest problem is that all these people have contact to each other.”
So far, the surveillance has been mostly unproductive.
“Many of them think they are under surveillance,” another investigator said, “so the telephone conversations are about everyday life–what they eat, where they meet, when the family is coming for a visit.”
Although sources say the CIA is keeping close tabs on the movement of Al Qaeda suspects in and out of Hamburg, preventing the inception of another terrorist plot is not simply a matter of guarding against the infiltration of trained terrorists awaiting a command to strike. Since Sept. 11, anti-terrorist investigators in Germany and elsewhere in Europe say, they have made a surprising discovery: Most of the Islamic radicals who pose a potential threat were once ordinary young men who emigrated to Hamburg to study or work, as the hijackers did.
“For several years,” a senior intelligence official said, “we thought of terrorists as `sleepers.’ Our first assumption was to think of espionage, which uses sleepers. But as we learned more, it became more evident that they changed their minds, changed their behavior, after arriving in Germany.”
Mohammed Zammar, the mujahedeen veteran and Al Qaeda recruiter who reportedly has told Syrian authorities he arranged for the hijackers to visit one of Osama bin Laden’s training camps in Afghanistan, had been living in Hamburg for 30 years. But Zammar, who made no secret of his radical Islamist views, was hardly a “sleeper,” and there is no evidence the hijackers themselves were Al Qaeda converts before they arrived in Germany.
“Somebody like Mohamed Atta,” says Andreas Croll, “he came to Germany as a student. To the extent that he came to study in Germany, he was Westernized to a certain extent. He was Muslim. He believed in God. He believed in his Muslim faith. His belief got stronger and stronger. He became a fundamentalist and then he started to plan the deed which led up to 11 September.
“If you keep that in mind, you’ll see that terrorists develop. They move on step by step. You have a normal student who then becomes a fundamentalist, who in the course of the time will then say that he is ready to sacrifice himself for the cause of jihad. He will start to find people who will support him, who will work with him in his plans and will then actually start to execute plans.”
Destined to be odd men out
Many of the Islamic radicals currently under suspicion are current or former university students who arrived filled with aspirations for professional careers and relatively affluent lives, only to find that no matter what their potential or their achievements they seemed destined to remain the odd men out.
“They knew they were intelligent,” the intelligence official said. “Most of them are in a way intellectual. But they were Arabs and Muslims. The world is ruled by Western people. This is a common feeling for the terrorist. They are different, never fully accepted.”