A U.S. intelligence intercept of suspicious communications between Pakistan and Stuttgart was the initial break that ultimately led to the arrest this week of three suspected Muslim militants accused of plotting massive car bomb attacks here against Americans, U.S. and German officials told the Los Angeles Times on Thursday. As police pressed their investigation of at least seven other suspects Thursday, including several who are believed to have left Germany, the officials said that communications detected last year by U.S. authorities were the specific and alarming tipoff to apparent terrorist activity. The sources asked to remain anonymous because they were not authorized to discuss the case publicly. American authorities passed on the lead to German police, who conducted a painstaking investigation that led to the arrests of the three suspects, two of them German converts to Islam. After receiving the initial lead, police suspected that militants here were communicating with Pakistan from an Internet cafe, a frequent strategy to avoid detection, but they did not know which one. So they deployed surveillance teams at several dozen Internet cafes around the city, officials said. The laborious stakeouts paid off when police spotted a 28-year-old convert who was already known as an associate of Islamic militants and has now been identified publicly as Fritz Gelowicz. The two others were identified only as Daniel Martin S., another German convert to Islam, and Ayem Y., a Turk living in Germany. Arrested this week with the two other suspects, Gelowicz was described Thursday by anti-terror officials as the lead figure of a group that learned bombmaking at an Al Qaeda-linked training camp in Pakistan last year. The three are accused of plotting to massacre Americans at or near military bases and airports in Germany with the equivalent of more than 1,000 pounds of TNT. Some 300 investigators worked around the clock for nine months to monitor the alleged plotters. Using sophisticated eavesdropping equipment of their own, the Germans watched and listened as the suspected cell coalesced and amassed a stash of bombmaking materials. When they announced the arrests Wednesday, German authorities said they had focused on Gelowicz after he was briefly detained in January on suspicion of scouting a U.S. military barracks. In reality, Gelowicz and his associates had already been identified as an urgent threat thanks to the American intercept last year, according to officials in both countries. Meanwhile, German authorities said the additional suspects were being sought both in Germany and elsewhere, The Associated Press reported. The names of five are known to police, said Andreas Christeleit, a spokesman for federal prosecutors. He did not provide any details.
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...