German police search Hamburg for terror suspects

HAMBURG, Germany (Reuters) – More than 1,000 German police
were deployed in a large-scale search for three terror suspects
in the north German port city of Hamburg on Thursday, a police
spokesman said.

Roadblocks and controls were set up at 12 points in
Germany’s second city after an Arabic-speaking witness
overheard the men at a bus stop on Wednesday, praising Allah
and heroism in Arabic. One of the men was carrying a backpack.

A police official said the search was launched and
information released to the public a day after the witness
heard the remarks because the police did not want to jeopardize
their initial criminal investigation.

Police said the three men had been recorded by video
surveillance cameras and their pictures would be released to
the public in the hope of getting more information about them
or their whereabouts.

“We don’t know at this point whether there is something to
the tip or not,” Hamburg state interior minister Udo Nagel told
a news conference. There were no concrete clues about an
attack, he said.

A police spokesman said the three men were overheard by the
witness, whom police said was a credible source, at a bus stop
near a local railway station in the Altona district of Hamburg.

The witness told police he heard one of the men use the
phrase “heroism before Allah.” The men then boarded a bus
heading away from the city center.

Hamburg, which has been put on terror alert several times
in the past four years, was the home of a group of radical Arab
students led by Mohamed Atta, the man who rammed the first of
four hijacked planes into the World Trade Center on September
11, 2001.

Last Friday, a friend of the September 11 suicide pilots
was found guilty in a Hamburg court of belonging to a terrorist
group, though the court ruled that he knew too little of their
plans to convict him on a second charge of abetting mass
murder.

Mounir El Motassadeq, a 31-year-old Moroccan who was a
friend of three of the suicide pilots living in Hamburg, was
sentenced to seven years in jail.