• E-mail
• Print
• Comment
• Font Size
• Digg
• del.icio.us
• Discuss article

German police search Hamburg for terror suspects

Posted on: Thursday, 25 August 2005, 16:21 CDT

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.

Source: REUTERS

More News in this Category