U.S. helped Germans thwart bomb plot
The discovery of a plot last week to detonate powerful bombs in Germany was a result of close cooperation between American and German security officials, with intelligence passing back and forth between the two sides, German officials said.
They said that American intelligence was instrumental in first bringing the plot to the attention of German intelligence and law enforcement agencies. Interceptions of e-mail messages and telephone calls between Germany and both Pakistan and Turkey raised the initial red flags in 2006, they said Saturday.
But the Americans also wanted to protect their sources, a German intelligence official said, which meant that the earliest warnings were vague.
The official said that the first communiqué consisted of the aliases of two men, Muaz and Zafer, who were said to have visited a terrorist training camp in Pakistan.
The nicknames were linked to two members of what the authorities call a breakaway cell of a Central Asian terrorist group, the Islamic Jihad Union, operating in Germany.
According to a confidential status report prepared by investigators after the arrests last week' and obtained by The New York Times, Atilla Selek, who the police say was involved in the scouting of American military barracks in the town of Hanau, goes by the alias Muaz.
Zafer appeared to refer to Zafer Sari, a 22-year-old man from the town of Neuenkirchen, the same hometown as Daniel Martin Schneider, one of the three men arrested last week and accused of planning to use hydrogen peroxide bombs.
"If we hadn't here and there gotten little puzzle pieces of information, often through coincidences, we wouldn't have found them," said the intelligence official.
He said the men were not only trained in explosives, but also in countersurveillance.
It was a mistake by a police officer the day before the arrest, the official said, that may have accelerated both the suspected plot and the arrest. The officer pulled the three suspects over for driving with their headlight high beams on. During the traffic stop, he said that the men were on the watch list of the German Federal Police. The suspects heard him, the official said, and so did the federal officers, listening electronically.
A German police official involved in the investigations of Islamic terrorism in southern Germany for several years said that "since 9/11, any information that had to do with the Islamic scene has been sent to the Americans," including information about members of the suspected plot.
The discussion was going on at the top levels of government as well.
President George W. Bush and Chancellor Angela Merkel were reported to have discussed the investigation at the Group of 8 conference in June, the German news magazine Spiegel said on its Web site.
Investigators here said that they feared that terrorist plots could still be under way in Germany by members of the Islamic Jihad Union cell who had not been arrested.
A senior investigator on the case, speaking on condition of anonymity, said, there might be "parallel planning" for separate attacks by members of the group.
"There are still three of them out there who have trained with explosives in the camps and these people are still free," he said.
They said that American intelligence was instrumental in first bringing the plot to the attention of German intelligence and law enforcement agencies. Interceptions of e-mail messages and telephone calls between Germany and both Pakistan and Turkey raised the initial red flags in 2006, they said Saturday.
But the Americans also wanted to protect their sources, a German intelligence official said, which meant that the earliest warnings were vague.
The official said that the first communiqué consisted of the aliases of two men, Muaz and Zafer, who were said to have visited a terrorist training camp in Pakistan.
The nicknames were linked to two members of what the authorities call a breakaway cell of a Central Asian terrorist group, the Islamic Jihad Union, operating in Germany.
According to a confidential status report prepared by investigators after the arrests last week' and obtained by The New York Times, Atilla Selek, who the police say was involved in the scouting of American military barracks in the town of Hanau, goes by the alias Muaz.
Zafer appeared to refer to Zafer Sari, a 22-year-old man from the town of Neuenkirchen, the same hometown as Daniel Martin Schneider, one of the three men arrested last week and accused of planning to use hydrogen peroxide bombs.
"If we hadn't here and there gotten little puzzle pieces of information, often through coincidences, we wouldn't have found them," said the intelligence official.
He said the men were not only trained in explosives, but also in countersurveillance.
It was a mistake by a police officer the day before the arrest, the official said, that may have accelerated both the suspected plot and the arrest. The officer pulled the three suspects over for driving with their headlight high beams on. During the traffic stop, he said that the men were on the watch list of the German Federal Police. The suspects heard him, the official said, and so did the federal officers, listening electronically.
A German police official involved in the investigations of Islamic terrorism in southern Germany for several years said that "since 9/11, any information that had to do with the Islamic scene has been sent to the Americans," including information about members of the suspected plot.
The discussion was going on at the top levels of government as well.
President George W. Bush and Chancellor Angela Merkel were reported to have discussed the investigation at the Group of 8 conference in June, the German news magazine Spiegel said on its Web site.
Investigators here said that they feared that terrorist plots could still be under way in Germany by members of the Islamic Jihad Union cell who had not been arrested.
A senior investigator on the case, speaking on condition of anonymity, said, there might be "parallel planning" for separate attacks by members of the group.
"There are still three of them out there who have trained with explosives in the camps and these people are still free," he said.
entrada de Gekko a las
2:04 p. m.
0 comentarios:
Publicar un comentario
Suscribirse a Enviar comentarios [Atom]
<< Inicio