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Hamburg tenants { September 15 2001 }

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   http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/nation/specials/attacked/A34506-2001Sep14.html

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/nation/specials/attacked/A34506-2001Sep14.html

Suspects Used German Rental As Headquarters
Police Believe at Least 2 Hijackers Were Among Tenants in Hamburg

By Peter Finn
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, September 15, 2001; Page A15


HAMBURG, Sept. 14 -- In November 1998, when real estate agent Thorsten Albrecht was seeking tenants for a modest second-floor apartment at 54 Marien St. in this multi-ethnic port city, he heard from a stream of people interested in renting it. But three young Arab men who applied together stood out as potentially ideal tenants.

Mohamed Atta, from the United Arab Emirates, and Ramzi Bialshibh, a citizen of Yemen, showed proof of German government scholarship money to attend the local Technical University. The third man in the group, Said Bahaji, had been born in Germany.

"They gave the impression of being nice and rather quiet young men," said Albrecht, 38. "Like totally normal foreign students."

German police now believe that the Marien Street apartment became the headquarters of a terrorist cell. The residence had a changing roster of tenants, and up to 20 Arab men gathered there three nights a week for meetings in dimly lit and sparsely furnished rooms.

And police believe that at least two of the men who lived there, Atta, and a later resident named Marwan Al-Shehhi, a citizen of the United Arab Emirates who enrolled at the same university in October 1999 to study electronics, were among the hijackers who crashed into the World Trade Center on flights that originated in Boston. FBI agents have arrived in Hamburg to investigate.

Atta, whose pursed-lipped image has now been seen by millions of Americans, studied town planning and urban development at the university's faculty of construction engineering; his 1999 thesis for a master's degree equivalent was on urban renewal, according to his supervisor, Prof. Dittmar Machule. Atta also sold cars on the side to earn extra money.

Many cities in Europe and North America have sizable Arab populations. Most members are peaceful and law-abiding, but scattered among many of the Arab communities, police say, are religious extremists. In Germany, many come as students, but devote much of their time to such tasks as raising cash for secret organizations and producing false identification papers and passports.

Open to the world through its port, Hamburg has a particularly large Arab community -- about 80,000 people in a population of 1.7 million -- and, authorities say, an active fundamentalist underground. Reinhard Wagner, head of the Domestic Intelligence Service in Hamburg, said that roughly 1,000 of 3,250 people in Germany whom authorities have identified as Arab extremists live in this city.

As the probe continues, German authorities say many signs point to their country. "It is highly likely that the clues needed to solve this [hijacking] mystery lie in student circles in Germany," said Kay Nehm, chief federal prosecutor.

German investigators have not tied the Marien Street cell to Osama bin Laden, the Saudi fugitive who the U.S. government suspects was behind the attacks in New York and Washington. But they say his fundraisers have been active here.

Mamdouh Mahmud Salim, allegedly the financial chief for bin Laden's al Qaeda organization, was arrested by police in the German state of Bavaria on Sept. 18, 1998. He was detained after the U.S. Justice Department requested his extradition. Salim was subsequently sent to the United States to face trial in connection with the bombing of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.

Two years later, on Dec. 10, 2000, Germany's elite GSG9 anti-terrorist unit stormed a home in Frankfurt and arrested four Islamic militants. Authorities found $14,000, machine guns, handguns with silencers, a hand grenade and large amounts of chemicals that can be used to make explosives.

Also found was a videotape of the French city of Strasbourg, home to the European Parliament, which allegedly was the target of a terrorist attack.

A further intelligence tip led to another Frankfurt arrest on April 11 this year of a bin Laden-connected extremist identified in Der Spiegel magazine as "Samir K."

As the world has been transfixed by TV images from the United States, the Arab community here has been anxious to distance itself from the violence.

"We are all very shocked," said Zulhajrat Fejzullahi, an imam, or leader, of a mosque whose congregation is mostly ethnic Albanian, speaking in an interview. "I am very sad about what happened. Islam does not teach us to do these things. It teaches us to do very different things."

At the city's main Arab mosque, a woman said, "We have nothing to do with this. We have nothing to do with this."

The three men who approached real estate agent Albrecht about the 780-square-foot apartment took occupancy on Dec. 1, 1998. When he met them, they wore Western-style clothes and he recalls them sitting in his office and inquiring about getting high-speed ISDN lines for their computers.

Albrecht occasionally made announced visits. "It just looked like a student's apartment," he said. "The kitchen was a little chaotic, and it was sparsely furnished -- normal, since students do not have money for furniture. There was a bed, a desk, a chair and a computer in each room. . . . There were never any complaints about them."

They always paid the rent on time by wire transfer from a bank, Albrecht said. Women or children or anyone who might be family were never seen at the apartment.

Neighbors in the building said the men did nothing to draw attention to themselves but were distinctive in the traditional Arab dress they donned when not interacting with Westerners.

"They were friendly and I didn't see them very often, but they had regular visitors," said Jawid Andkohiy, 28, an Afghan who lives upstairs and would see rows of shoes outside the apartment in the evening where guests left them as they entered. "I am a Muslim as well and I heard them reading the Koran as I passed the door."

Armin Schulz, 52, who lived above the three men, said his neighbors struck him as unusual because they had so little furniture. "They spoke very good German," Schulz said.

Across the street, Monika van Minden, 52, could see directly into the men's apartment. Having a regular cigarette at her kitchen window at 10:15 each night, she noted large groups of men there. "They were sitting in a circle on the floor and painting or writing things on paper which they hung on the wall," said van Minden, who could not make out what was being depicted.

Van Minden said there were meetings in the apartment about three times a week with seven regulars including a "fat man" who arrived in a beat-up station wagon with others. They carried bags into the apartment.

"We have all the names," said Olaf Scholz, interior minister for the city-state of Hamburg, of the network that met in the apartment. Police have launched a hunt for the men but acknowledge that some have already left Germany.

Germany released an airport worker today after holding him for 24 hours in connection with the investigation. He was picked up in a raid on an apartment where police were looking for another suspect.

When he rented the apartment in 1998, Atta, 33 at the time of his death, was in Germany legally and had been enrolled at the university here for six years. In 1999, he finished at the university but remained involved there with an Islamic study group, which had about 10 to 15 members. The university's chancellor once attended one of the group's meetings but heard nothing that raised any suspicions, university officials said.

After the attacks Tuesday, police seized the study group's computers and commandeered the university's server, which they used to check the e-mail messages of Atta and others, sources said.

But at the university and in his work as a car dealer, Atta gave no indication to casual acquaintances of having extremist beliefs.

"He made such a friendly impression," said Abdullah Bozkurt, 59, a dealer who knew Atta from the open-air car market on Hamburg's Feld Street, where both traded. "He easily got in contact with everybody, was always smiling and never in a bad mood."

"He was a very nice young man, polite, very religious, and with highly developed critical faculties, alert and observant," said Machule, the professor who supervised Atta's thesis, an examination of urban renewal in the old quarter of the Syrian city of Aleppo, known for its historic religious tolerance. "He was very religious. . . . But thinking back on the degree thesis, there are phrases and passages in that thesis which could suggest someone who could be exploited by others because of their religious beliefs."

Machule said Atta was often away from college for long periods but explained that he had family problems in Egypt.

Al-Shehhi, another Marien street resident, registered at the university in October 1999 to study electronics. It is unclear if he attended any classes, university President Christian Nedess said in an interview. He dropped out the following year.

In August 1999, Albrecht's tenant informed him that Said Bahaji, the German citizen, had left the apartment to be replaced by Abdelghani Mzdoui from the United Arab Emirates.

Albrecht had no problem accepting the change, but early this year when they canceled the lease, he was surprised to find that one of the three names on the signed letter he received was new to him: Zakaria Ess Abar. On March 1, 2001, they handed over the apartment empty, clean and freshly painted, and Albrecht did not ask any questions.

Police now believe a number of different individuals, including Al-Shehhi, lived at the apartment although they were not on the lease.

German authorities said Al-Shehhi left on a flight for the United States on May 2, 2001. It is unclear when Atta left Germany.

Special correspondents Petra Krischok and Erik Schelzig contributed to this report.



© 2001 The Washington Post Company


German recruited { June 12 2002 }
German suspect { August 28 2002 }
Hamburg tenants { September 15 2001 }
Hijacker boasted { August 30 2002 }
Planned 99 germany { August 30 2002 }
Suspects german rental { September 15 2001 }

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