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Key suspect was under German watch
By DAVID RISING
Associated Press Writer
9/29/01
HAMBURG, Germany - German security officials say a key suspect in the U.S. terror attacks attracted their attention before federal prosecutors issued an international warrant for him on more than 5,000 counts of murder.
Said Bahaji, a 26-year-old German-Moroccan, at one time was under observation for involvement in Islamic groups in Hamburg, but the investigation was dropped. Officials would not comment on when the probe began or ended.
A German law enforcement official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said there was no evidence at that time of any criminal activities.
But since the attacks, federal prosecutors have accused Bahaji of helping organize apartments, passports and visas for Mohamed Atta, 33, Marwan Al-Shehhi, 23, and Ziad Jarrahi, 26 - identified by the FBI as hijackers on two jetliners that crashed into the World Trade Center in New York and in rural Pennsylvania on Sept. 11.
He is believed to have since fled the country.
FBI agents and German counter-intelligence agents scoured for clues Saturday in Hamburg, where some of the suspected hijackers and two fugitives who are increasingly the focus of the investigation lived and studied in recent years.
U.S. agents came and went from Hamburg police headquarters Saturday, but the FBI's new satellite office would not comment publicly on the investigation there.
In the emerging structure of the Hamburg terror cell, Bahaji and another man sought by police worldwide, Ramzi Binalshibh, were the logisticians - providing the infrastructure so the three so-called sleepers could carry on quiet lives and escape notice until they were activated.
Binalshibh is also believed to have left the country.
"Bahaji told his wife he would go to Pakistan and left, we think, at the beginning of September this year,'' said a law enforcement official involved in the investigation. "Binalshibh, we don't know.''
Then there are the money men, who continue to elude investigators.
They seemed on the verge of a breakthrough when President Bush issued a list of people and organizations with suspected links to terrorism - including Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida network - that named a Hamburg electronics dealer who admitted contact with Bahaji.
Mamoun Darkazanli caught German investigators' notice in 1998 after he turned out to have power of attorney over a Hamburg bank account opened by bin Laden's suspected finance chief Mamdouh Mahmud Salim, the German newspaper Sueddeutsche Zeitung reported this week.
Salim was arrested in Germany in 1998 and turned over to the United States in connection with the bombings of two U.S. embassies in Africa.
But German investigators found nothing in a search of Darkazanli's apartment two days after the attacks to open a formal investigation against him.
Darkazanli, a Syrian, admitted seeing Atta and Bahaji at a wedding in Hamburg, but denied any role in the attacks in an interview with The Associated Press after Bush's list was released. He said the extent of his dealings with Salim in the mid-1990s was a one-time business deal for a radio transmitter to Sudan that fell through.
He has since not been reachable by telephone and neighbors say he has not returned to his Hamburg apartment. Law enforcement sources insist he is still in Hamburg, and remains under surveillance, along with a second Syrian questioned, Abdul K. Zammar.
A team of 50 German federal investigators and 50 Hamburg police searched 16 apartments on Sept. 12-19, the source said. They are now focusing on the money trail that funded the cell.
Rohan Gunaratna, of the Center for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence at St. Andrew's University, Scotland, said he believes the fact that the Hamburg cell had been around for so long means others were likely recruited into the mission and that there are other cells in the city.
Frauke Scheuten, a spokeswoman for the Federal Prosecutor's Office, which is heading the German investigation, said she could not comment on whether there are any leads pointing to other Hamburg cells.
But on Saturday, her office issued a statement announcing the arrests of three men suspected of belonging to a fundamentalist terror organization involved in plotting attacks in Germany.
Prosecutors have not linked the trio, arrested in the central German city of Wiesbaden, to the Sept. 11 attacks but said authorities were launching an investigation into a Hamburg-based group of people from Arabic countries suspected of being part of terrorist cells.
"The accused are suspected of plotting violent attacks in Germany while belonging to an organization with a fundamentalist Islamic background,'' the statement said. They were charged with possession of weapons and forging documents, the statement said.
One of the men arrested ran an Islamic Web site that included information about joining Muslim fighters in the Caucasus, gathering financial support for the radical Taliban regime in Afghanistan, which harbors bin Laden, and "military training for The Fight.''
The site's mailing list included an e-mail address for Said Bahaji.