Lying in wait: Terrorists in Germany took pains to be unremarkable
By DAVID RISING Associated Press Writer
HAMBURG, Germany (AP) -- Only in retrospect were there any signals that three Arab students living and studying in Germany were terrorists in waiting.
Final farewells. Cryptic questions. Dedicating work to Allah. On their own, none of this portended very much.
But in the aftermath of the deadly attacks on the United States last week, even their studies take on a ghastly overtone: Urban planning. Aircraft construction. Pilot training.
Mohammed Atta, Marwan al-Shehhi and Ziad Jarrah were classic "sleepers" -- agents who stay out of trouble until they activate, making them that much harder to identify. Only after the three men perished in attacks did federal prosecutors, acting on a tip from the FBI, pinpoint the Hamburg cell they believe formed early this year to target symbolic U.S. targets.
People who knew the men during their years in Germany are now looking for significance in their words and deeds.
And following five arrests of men with links to Osama bin Laden since December and the Munich arrest of bin Laden's finance chief in 1998, shocked German authorities are trying to figure out why intelligence didn't detect the Hamburg group and their intentions before their deadly strikes.
"We knew that we had these cells in the country. That's good, but what you really need to do is watch the sleepers," said Bernd Schmidbauer, the German government's intelligence chief in the 1990s. "I'm not blaming anybody, but we do need to improve cooperation internationally."
He said sleepers are usually fed instructions -- and possibly cash -- by couriers from their international terrorist groups, making it harder to find them using high-tech surveillance on which intelligence operations have tended to rely.
"They stay underground like any agent in a cheap spy novel," he said.
Mohamed Atta, 33, who the FBI said was on American Airlines Flight 11 -- the first plane to hit the World Trade Center -- began work on a degree in urban planning at Hamburg's Technical University in 1992.
Already an architect, he chose the specialized field of the preservation and history of towns, concentrating on Islamic cities, his thesis supervisor Professor Dittmar Machule said.
Sitting on Monday at the same wood table with chipped red paint where Atta defended his thesis, Machule said it was hard to reconcile his impression of a polite and kind student with the terrorist on TV.
"I had no signs that there was radicalism in his thinking when he was here," Machule said. "It is an irony that he studied town planning and then destroyed a town."
Martin Ebert, 31, a former classmate, knew Atta as a man who was deeply religious, but unfazed by Ebert's atheist upbringing in former communist East Germany.
"I was very sad at first after learning about what he did, but now, after some days, I'm really terribly angry," Ebert said from his home in Norway. "He lied to us all, and not only that, he did these terrible things."
There were signs, both Ebert and Machule said. Just nothing they recognized at the time.
During school, Atta, whom they knew as Mohamed El-Amir, would frequently disappear for months. He never told Ebert where he was going and told Machule he had to go home to Cairo for family problems.
In 1995, after beginning his thesis, he disappeared for nearly four years, Machule said. He reappeared to finish and defend his work in 1999 -- sporting a traditional Muslim beard.
In his dissertation, on the development of an area of the northern Syrian trading city of Aleppo, there is nothing to betray Atta's politics, Machule said.
"There's no anti-Americanism, no anti-Zionism, no anti-Christianity," Machule said. "Just good thinking."
But on a page Atta included between the cover page and the 160 page document, Machule found a phrase from the Quran in German and in Arabic:
"My prayers and my offerings and my life and my death belong to Allah, master of the world."
"I was astounded," Machule said. "But when I asked him about it the explanation was simple. He said, 'It's because I'm very happy to have finished this hard work and want to offer it to my God for my future life.' I had no doubts about the explanation. Now, maybe I have doubts."
Atta lived off-campus with his nephew al-Shehhi, who was identified Monday by a senior official in the United Arab Emirates as possibly belonging to bin Laden's Al Qaeda group -- the first tenuous link between the German suspects and the prime suspect in Tuesday's attack. The official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Atta may have recruited al-Shehhi -- who the FBI says was aboard United Airlines Flight 175, the second flight to hit the World Trade Center.
According to one of al-Shehhi's relatives, who spoke on condition of anonymity, al-Shehhi, 23, spent most of his time in his native United Arab Emirates in a mosque next to his house, reading the Quran and praying.
He was also withdrawn, rarely socializing with his peers. Al-Shehhi would accompany his father to the mosque and would make the call to prayer if his father was late.
In 1997, he began studying German at the University of Bonn under the name Marwan Lekrab, according to the school.
The relative said during one of his rare returns to the Emirates, his mother offered to apply for a bank loan and start a business for him. He refused and told her he was leaving and to say her final goodbye to him.
In 2000, Atta and al-Shehhi, took pilot training courses together in Florida, the FBI said.
The third Hamburg suspect, Jarrah, 26, surprised friends in 1999, when he suddenly announced he was leaving his studies at a Hamburg technical college where he had been studying aircraft construction for two years.
He asked one of his best friends if he would miss him when he was gone.
The friend Michael Gotzmann, 27, said he never thought to answer the question: He had asked for Jarrah's new address and phone number, and was sure they would stay in touch.
"We studied together, ate together, went through thick and thin together -- we were on the same wavelength," Gotzmann said.
But Gotzmann never heard anything from or about Jarrah again -- until he was reported on the flight that crashed in rural Pennsylvania.
During his time with Jarrah, Gotzmann said the United States never came up in discussions.
"We talked about politics but never about America. He wanted to go to America to study."
But his account of Jarrah differs somewhat from Jarrah's family's recollections of a secular student who drank alcohol, which is forbidden by Islam.
Jarrah did have a girlfriend -- who has been taken into protective custody as a witness -- but never drank, Gotzman said. He was known to pray five times a day.
"He was of deep Islamic belief, which didn't bother us, he was open-minded to the world," he said. "We didn't realize he had these kind of ideas."
German officials, meanwhile, are trying to identify how many more, if any, agents may still be in the country. School officials said four people wanted for questioning by prosecutors were students or former students at the Hamburg Technical University.
One former student is being sought on a warrant charging him with murder, air piracy and belonging to a banned organization. German media reports have identified him as Said Bahaji, a 26-year-old German citizen of Moroccan origin who helped organize visas and apartments. Relatives have said he is in Pakistan for an internship.
A woman who answered a bell at his sister's address in Hamburg refused to comment.
University spokesman Ruediger Bendlin said Tuesday that investigators questioned one student but did not take him into custody. Another was only on the list because of a connection to the student questioned by police.
Along with Bahaji, one other student is still being sought, Bendlin said.
AP-ES-09-18-01 1054EDT |
