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Cathy Garner was worried that her son Nick Alden would be in danger in Afghanistan. Alden, a U.S. Air Force airman, didn’t make it to Afghanistan. He died Wednesday when a gunman whom authorities are describing as an Islamic extremist began shooting on a bus at an airport at Frankfurt, Germany. Alden was 24. Garner got the news in a telephone call from her ex-husband, who told her that their youngest son charged the gunman after seeing him fatally shoot the bus driver. At least 10 airmen dressed in civilian clothes were on the bus at the time of the...

In an apparent Muslim terrorist attack, a gunman opened fire on a U.S. Air Force bus outside Frankfurt airport Wednesday, killing two airmen and wounding two others. A source told Fox News that the shooter yelled "Allahu Akbar" - the Muslim battle cry - as he began firing. Kosovo's interior minister told The Associated Press that German police have identified the suspect as Arif Uka, a citizen of Kosovo from the northern town of Mitrovica.

Two US soldiers have been killed in a shooting at Frankfurt airport, Sky sources have said. Two other people are said to have been injured in the incident and police have reportedly arrested a 21-year-old suspect from Kosovo. The shots were fired on or near a bus carrying soldiers, according to reports.

Police in Hamburg shut down the notorious al-Quds mosque, renamed the Taiba mosque in 2008, led by German-Syrian national and voluntary imam Mamoun Darkazanli. Darkazanli (a.k.a. Abu Ilyas al-Suri) has been a suspected al-Qaeda operative, primarily as a financier and logistician, in the European Union for close to two decades. Long active in al-Qaeda circles, Darkazanli first surfaced on the radar of Western intelligence agencies when he purportedly helped procure a cargo ship named “Jennifer” for Osama bin Laden as early as 1993 (Hamburger Abendblatt, October 16, 2004). Germany’s Bundeskriminalamt (BKA- Federal Criminal Police Office) admitted that it had been...

SHAWANGAI, Pakistan -- An alleged member of the Hamburg, Germany, terror cell linked to the Sept. 11 attacks is believed to be among al Qaeda leaders helping the Taliban fight Pakistani forces in South Waziristan, Pakistani authorities said Thursday. A German passport belonging to Said Bahaji, a close associate of Sept. 11 lead hijacker Mohammed Atta in the 2001 attacks, was among documents recovered this week by Pakistani troops from an abandoned militant compound in Shawangai. The mountain village in South Waziristan was used as an al Qaeda and Taliban command base until as recently as this week, a military...

Picture of Evil: Bloodthirsty German Al Qaeda Fanatic Poses With 2Ft-Long Knife For Beheading British Soldiers In Afghanistan [Pic in URL] By MAIL FOREIGN SERVICE 09th October 2009 Warning: Abu Askar records a video while holding the knife An Al Qaeda fanatic who trains fellow Europeans to fight in Afghanistan has given a stark warning to our troops - by posing with a 2ft-long beheading knife. The bearded terrorist, identified as ‘Abu Askar the German’, belongs to one of Osama Bin Laden’s ‘foreign legions’ fighting alongside the Taliban. In a new terror video posted online he vows to 'achieve a...

Special Dispatch - No. 2576 October 4, 2009 New Threat Message Warns: Al-Qaeda Will Attack Germany on a Sunday in October Introduction The Al-Falluja jihadist forum has posted a new threat message to Germany specifying that attacks will be carried out on one of the Sundays in October. It is titled "To the Infidel German Nation: We Bestow on You the Kindness, for the Third Time, of Specifying the Appointed Day!" The message, which is being heavily promoted by Al-Falluja, is the latest in a series of threats to appear on the forum [1] following the release of Al-Qaeda videos...

Travel Alert U.S. DEPARTMENT OF STATE Bureau of Consular Affairs This information is current as of today, Sun Sep 27 2009 02:36:27 GMT-0700 (PDT). Germany September 23, 2009 The Department of State alerts U.S. citizens that Al Qaeda has threatened it will conduct terrorist attacks in Germany immediately prior to and following the federal elections on September 27. This Travel Alert expires on November 11, 2009. Al Qaeda recently released a video specifically warning Germany of attacks. German authorities are taking the threat seriously and have taken measures to enhance the level of security throughout the country. The Department of...

SNIPPET: "According to ITRR, the latest jihadist communication was unusual in that it was very explicit and open in targeting the Germans, in discussing a coming attack, and in specifying its timing. Aside from Ramadan, which ends 19 September 2009, the upcoming German national election on September 27 has been marked as a "red flag date" by ITRR." SNIPPET: "German security services have also been cited in local media discussing stepped up jihadist chatter, threats and intelligence warnings aimed at the German state in recent months. Earlier this year, video messages delivered in German by an al-Qaeda fighter going by...

Germany has been increasingly forced to confront "homegrown" Islamist terrorism, the threat of radicalized converts to Islam, and the threat of non-integrated Muslim immigrants. In 2003, Iranian-backed Hizbullah was found to have identified Israeli, Jewish, and American facilities in Germany as terror targets. Which are the prominent radical Islamic groups operating in Germany? The Islamic Jihad Union (IJU), one of the most significant threats to German national security, is a Sunni terrorist organization closely associated with al-Qaeda. IJU is well known to the German public due to frequent video threats published on the Internet and on television. Hizb ut-Tahir al-Islami...

SNIPPET: "BERLIN: Germany is home to several hundred “potentially dangerous Islamists” including a hard core of around 100 people classed as dangerous, a senior Interior Ministry official said on Friday. Between 60 and 80 “jihadists” out of some 140 have returned to Germany, who had undergone training in camps in the Tribal Areas on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, State Secretary August Hanning said. “The danger should not be underestimated. The 60 to 80 who have returned make up the overwhelming majority of up to around 100 people whom we class as dangerous,” Hanning told the Tagesspiegel daily’s Saturday edition. “On top...

BERLIN (Reuters) - Al Qaeda issued an Internet threat against German soldiers at the weekend, which the government in Berlin said showed the risk of a Islamist attack on German soil had increased.

Germany has been threatened with attacks for its presence in Afghanistan in a video released yesterday by the US centre for surveillance of Islamist sites (SITE). In the 30 minute Video message, a man calling himself Abu Talha Al-Alamani and presumed to be a member of al Queda says the Germans are "gullible and naive" if they thought they could "escape unscathed when they are the third occupation force in Afghanistan." The man, whose face is hidden by a black turban in the video, adds: "Letting me blow myself up in the name of Allah has been my wish since...

Christian Klar, now 56, will walk out of jail after 26 years on January 3 after a court ruling. The decision comes despite earlier demands that he make an apology for his murderous crimes still not being met. Klar is portrayed in 'The Baader-Meinhof Complex' which is currently playing in British cinemas. The movie documents the crimes of the urban terrorists before they took the name RAF and it has been heavily criticised in Germany, particularly by the families of victims, for portraying him and his cohorts as 'cool' and their methods justified. Klar has shown no repentance for...

BERLIN – Officials say German police carried out raids in three states searching for suspected supporters of a terror cell whose plans to attack U.S. targets in Germany were foiled last year. Federal prosecutors' spokesman Frank Wallenta says police made no arrests during Thursday's raids on the residences of several people suspected of acquiring detonators for three alleged terror plotters.

Cologne - Far-left protesters set up the first road blocks in Cologne to prevent a scheduled far-right anti-Islam rally in the city on Saturday. Elsewhere in the city, police secured access to the site where the demonstration is planned. However, the scene was dominated by peaceful demonstrators streaming into the city in large numbers to protest against the right-wing rally. Several hundred police forces were deployed across the city ahead of the controversial "Anti-Islam Conference" organized by a city group, Pro Cologne. Pro Cologne which won 5 per cent of votes at the last city-council elections, has invited 1,000 to...

If Iran is not supporting al-Qaeda efforts why is it so many terrorists in Europe use Tehran as their transit point between Europe and the training facilities and gathering forces of al-Qaeda inside Pakistan? On April 1, the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) on April 1 notified leaders of Germany’s military, the United Nations and potential targets — including a five-star hotel in Kabul — that two men from Germany with known ties to terrorist groups could be planning a bomb attack against Germans in Afghanistan.The men are identified as Eric B., a 20-year-old German Muslim convert, and Houssain al-M.,...

BERLIN, Germany (AP) -- Lebanese authorities have warned of terrorist attacks being planned on targets within Germany, prompting the Justice Ministry in Berlin to increase its security measures, authorities said Saturday. "There was a tip from Lebanon -- a warning tip," said Stefanie Amft, a spokeswoman for German federal police. She said that the threat was related to the worldwide terrorism threat, but would not give further details. "It is known that Germany is part of this worldwide threat," she said. The comments come after two magazines, Focus and Der Spiegel, reported that the German Embassy in Beirut had received...

A new study commissioned by Germany's Interior Ministry warns of a growing threat from the radicalization of Muslims in the country. Six percent of Muslims in Germany support violence in the name of Islam, the authors write. A new study released by Germany's Interior Ministry has added new fuel to the debate about integration of Muslims in Germany, with the report warning about the danger of radicalization of Muslims. According to the study, which was published Tuesday, around 40 percent of Muslims surveyed had a "fundamentalist orientation," which the authors defined as a strongly religious worldview and moral values.

A KEY suspect in the alleged plot to mount an attack in Germany on the scale of 9/11 is on the run in Britain, German security officials disclosed yesterday. Scotland Yard counterterrorism detectives are hunting the man, who escaped from Germany after a plot to explode bombs at Frankfurt airport and a US airbase. The collective power of the bombs would have exceeded those in Madrid and London in 2004 and 2005. The plot was foiled on September 4 when three men were arrested at a rented holiday apartment near the central German town of Kassel. Police recovered chemicals and...

The US director of intelligence has said wiretaps played a significant role in stopping bomb attacks by suspected Islamists in Germany last week. Michael McConnell told a Senate committee eavesdropping had revealed that the suspects had obtained explosive liquids. He said Congress should not restrict the programme. In August, a temporary bill was adopted allowing eavesdropping on foreign terror suspects without a warrant. Controversial programme Mr McConnell said the surveillance programme had made "significant contributions" in discovering and breaking up a suspected plot in Germany to bomb US installations. "It allowed us to see and understand all the connections to...

BERLIN (Reuters) - Three suspected Islamist militants who were planning to attack American targets in Germany had orders to act by Sept. 15 and knew police were hot on their trail before their arrest, a magazine said on Saturday. The plan was foiled on Tuesday when police arrested two German converts to Islam and a Turk in the biggest German police investigation in the last 30 years. According to surveillance details published in Der Spiegel magazine, the men had been given a two-week deadline for their planned strikes in a late August call from northern Pakistan that was monitored by...

GERMAN police questioning “Fritz the Taliban”, a 28-year-old Munich-born terror suspect, revealed yesterday that they are hunting up to 49 Islamist plotters over a conspiracy to use truck bombs to blow up air-ports, bars and discos. The arrest of Fritz Gelowicz as one of the plot’s alleged ringleaders has shocked Germans. It emerged this weekend that he was raised in a middle-class family in largely Roman Catholic Bavaria before converting to Islam at the age of 18 and changing his name to Abdullah following the break-up of his parents’ marriage. “Fritzi” was remembered by neighbours as a “little blond boy”...

Der Spiegel has interesting information about the terror bust in Germany; as usual, however, you have to read between the lines: Three suspected Islamist militants who were planning to attack U.S. installations in Germany had orders to act by Sept. 15....According to surveillance details published in Der Spiegel magazine, the men had been given a two-week deadline for their planned strikes in a late August call from northern Pakistan that was monitored by German police. So al Qaeda's top leaders were anxious to precipitate an attack on Americans by September 15. Why? That's the date on which General Petraeus will...

BERLIN — After thwarting what might have become a "massive" attack on American installations, German authorities will review ways to fight homegrown terrorists, including a proposal to allow Internet spying on all German converts to Islam. The search for seven other suspected members of a German cell of the Pakistan-based Islamic Jihad Union continued into Thursday night, with investigators saying only that they knew who they were seeking. Anti-terror police arrested three men in a village in central Germany Tuesday, outside a vacation cabin where they were suspected of building a bomb. Germans were shocked to learn that two of...

Ulm (AFP) - The quiet town of Ulm is well-known in Germany as home to a group of Islamic extremists but its residents never imagined it could produce the presumed ringleader of a plot to bomb US targets. "Everyone here knew that there was an Islamist centre in Ulm, but people are in shock. Noone imagined that it would go this far," Ivo Goenner, mayor of the town of 120,000 people on the banks of the river Danube told AFP. Fritz Gelowicz, 28, was the suspected leader of a three-man extremist cell planning to bomb US citizens in Germany, grew...

US tip-off foiled German bomb plot, reports say Jess Smee in Berlin<>br Saturday September 8, 2007 The Guardian (UK) A tip-off from US intelligence helped to foil the terror bomb plot in Germany, it emerged yesterday. "The first piece of hard evidence on the bomb plot against American military and airbases in Germany was transmitted to the German authorities from American intelligence officials," Rolf Tophoven, director of the German institute for terrorist research and security policy, said. US satellite systems picked up on electronic contact between Pakistan and Germany more than 10 months ago, he said. "From then on, the...

BERLIN — Three militant Islamic terror suspects had acquired vans that might have been intended for use in bomb attacks on U.S. and other targets in Germany, a spokeswoman for prosecutors said Saturday. Estimates of the size of the plot ranged as high as 50 people, and prosecutors were looking the possibility of a wider terrorist network. German authorities think the two German converts and a Turk arrested Tuesday were only the leading tip of the planning, said Petra Kneuer, spokeswoman for the Federal Prosecutor's Office. She said authorities were investigating seven more suspects inside and outside Germany as part...

BERLIN (Reuters) - Three suspected Islamist militants who were planning to attack American targets in Germany had orders to act by September 15 and knew police were hot on their trail before their arrest, a magazine said on Saturday. The plan was foiled on Tuesday when police arrested two German converts to Islam and a Turk in the biggest German police investigation in the last 30 years. According to surveillance details published in Der Spiegel magazine, the men had been given a two-week deadline for their planned strikes in a late August call from northern Pakistan that was monitored by...

The prime suspect in the alleged German terror plot to blow up hundreds of people may have had contact with Mohammed Atta, the suicide pilot who smashed a hijacked plane into the Twin Towers. German police reports are vague about the encounter, but it has helped investigators to trace Fritz Gelowicz’s path from average Bavarian schoolboy to Islamic radical. His case has also highlighted the curious and sinister role of Neu-Ulm — a small township in the Roman Catholic heart of southern Germany — as a cradle of Islamic extremism. The connection between Gelowicz, 28, who was arrested this week,...

German police were today searching for around 10 more members of a terror cell suspected of plotting major bomb attacks, after the arrest of three men and the seizure of explosives materials. Officials have said the three men already in custody - two German converts to Islam and a Turkish national - were planning attacks which could have proved more deadly than those in London or Madrid, with possible targets including US military bases, discos, pubs and Frankfurt's international airport. August Hanning, a senior interior ministry official who formerly headed Germany's foreign intelligence service (BND), said today that police were...

UK link to terrorists planning new 9/11 massacre 05.09.07 Islamic terrorists planning a massacre in Germany on the anniversary of the September 11 attacks phoned British contacts as they plotted, it has emerged. They planned to strike at German airports and US bases exactly six years after hijacked planes ploughed into the World Trade Centre. The three suspects, two German converts to Islam and a Turk who had undergone military training at Taliban camps in Pakistan, were caught with 750kg of hydrogen peroxide, a chemical easily transformed into explosives. Several calls to British numbers are said to been made from...

Three men have been arrested for planning attacks on Frankfurt's international airport and the U.S. military base in Ramstein, the German Defense Minister said Wednesday. "There was an imminent threat," Franz Josef Jung told Germany's ARD broadcaster. He declined to elaborate. Two of the suspects had German citizenship while the third was Pakistani, Germany's Sudwestrundfunk public broadcaster said. German federal prosecutors said they had arrested three suspected members of "an Islamic motivated terrorist organization." It was not immediately clear whether the three were suspected of having links to al Qaeda. Sudwestrundfunk said the men were arrested Tuesday evening and were...

Police have smashed a suspected al Qaeda terror cell nursing a "profound hatred of US citizens" plotting to bomb civilian and military jets. The force of the planned explosions would have been worse than the train bombings in Madrid and the Tube and bus attacks in London on 7 July, 2005, according to German security sources. Those attacks killed 191 and 52 people respectively. Three men aged 22, 28 and 29 have been arrested in Germany days before they planned to strike, and bomb-making equipment and explosives have been seized. The arrests come a day after Danish police conducted raids...

BERLIN - German officials on Friday defended a proposal to use "Trojan horse" software to secretly monitor potential terror suspects' hard drives, amid fierce debate over whether the measures violate civil liberties. Interior Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble wants to include the measure in a broader security law being considered by conservative Chancellor Angela Merkel's coalition government. Carried in e-mails that appear to come from other government offices, the software would allow authorities to investigate suspects' Internet use and the data stored on their hard drives without their knowledge. Use of the government-produced technology for spying on terror suspects "will cover a...

BERLIN - A man accused of raising money for al-Qaida in Iraq and helping to supply foreign fighters for the insurgency there went on trial Wednesday in the northern city of Schleswig. The 37-year-old man — identified only as Redouane E.H. in court documents_ holds German and Moroccan citizenship and lived in the northern city of Kiel. He was arrested in Hamburg in July 2006. Prosecutors said he made four money transfers worth a total of $6,800 to Egypt and Syria between August 2005 and July 2006. The funds, they said, were destined to supply equipment for "holy warriors," cover...

For years, Interior Minister Wolfgang Schäuble has been trying to jack up German domestic security in the face of a growing terror threat to the country. These days, the rest of the country seem to be listening. Interior Minister Wolfgang Schäuble has divided Germany with his suggestions on how to deal with terrorism. The discussion on how best to combat the danger of terror attacks in Germany has almost reached the status of a ritual: Interior Minister Wolfgang Schäuble calls for security forces to be granted greater leeway in investigating and going after suspected terrorists; the opposition cries foul and...

BERLIN (Reuters) - German authorities called on Friday for increased vigilance against possible terror attacks and said the kind of threat detected before the September 11, 2001 suicide hijackings in the United States had resurfaced. Interior Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble said the threat was "serious" and suicide attacks were possible on German soil. The present situation recalled the summer of 2001 "when obscure threats surfaced which, as we know, became reality", said Deputy Interior Minister August Hanning. "We are seeing evidence that some action is planned in (the Afghanistan and Pakistan region) but also further afield, in Europe and in the...

A combination intelligence "chatter," a suspicious video, and arrests along the Pakistani border have led authorities to warn that the threat of terrorist attacks in Germany is real.Germany faced an elevated threat of terrorism on Friday because of its involvement in Afghanistan, according to officials who say the risk of an attack here is as high as it has ever been since September 11, 2001. "We are alarmed," the normally mild-mannered August Hanning, Deputy Secretary at the Federal Ministry of the Interior, told reporters on Thursday evening. Hanning said the level of so-called "chatter" from intelligence sources reminded him of...

THE publication of caricatures depicting the Prophet Mohammed was the trigger for a failed attempt to bomb passenger trains in Germany, police have concluded. One of the main suspects, Youssef Mohammed el Hajdib, who was arrested in Germany on August 16, "interpreted (the cartoons) as an insult to Islam by the western world,'' Joerg Ziercke, the director of Germany's federal police, told Focus magazine in an interview to be published on Monday. He and the other main suspect in the failed plot, Jihad Hamad, who was arrested in Lebanon on August 24, were also influenced by the killing of the...

A COLLEAGUE TELLS ME of a friend who was at the Hamburg train station during a recent bomb scare. Passengers, evacuated from the suspect train, were quite upset--about the delay. No one took the threat seriously. I confess to my own mundane thoughts in a similar situation. I was at the Zurich airport last month departing for London when the news came that flights to Britain were cancelled because the Brits had thwarted a major terrorist plot. My first thought was, How in the world will I ever get my checked suitcase back? This summer's thwarted plot to blow up...

TWO failed attempts to bomb trains in western Germany in July had originally been planned for the football World Cup, a newspaper reported overnight. The Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung cited security sources as saying interrogation of the suspects had established that the would-be bombers had abandoned the original plan as they had considered the implications of such an attack. One of the bombs was found in July on a train in Dortmund, which hosted some of June and July's World Cup matches. The other was found on a train in Koblenz. Extracts of the article, released in advance of today's publication,...

Baghdad, 1 Sept. (AKI) - The latest frontier in al-Qaeda's cyber propaganda war is an attempt to win the hearts and minds of young Muslims living in Germany, Austria or Switzerland. The Global Islamic Media Front, the 'media arm' of the terror netework, has launched a webpage that translates into German all the statements of the Iraqi guerilla groups and publishes their videos. The site is updated daily publishing the most interesting of the Jihadi douments that can be found in jihadi forums in Arabic. The latest update contains a video testament of a young Saudi suicide bomber Abu Omar...

The disclosure that a botched plot to bomb two German trains last month involved a 21-year-old Lebanese man has punctured the sense of immunity many Germans felt from the Islamic terrorist attacks that have haunted other European countries. The bombing plot, which has led to the arrest of the Lebanese suspect in northern Germany and an intense manhunt for a second suspect, is also reshaping a politically charged debate in Berlin over how much latitude to give law enforcement authorities in fighting terrorism. On Monday, Chancellor Angela Merkel reaffirmed her support for expanded use of closed-circuit cameras in train stations...

In the coded language of Lokman Amin Mohammed's smuggling network, fighters and suicide bombers sent to Iraq were called "workers" for "the firm." When one band of fighters he smuggled from Germany launched its first attack, Mohammed exclaimed in a phone conversation: "They have celebrated their first feast." Last month, the 33-year-old was sentenced in Munich to seven years in prison for smuggling fighters to and from Iraq, and for membership in "the firm," better known as Ansar al-Islam, an Al Qaeda-linked group responsible for suicide attacks against civilians and U.S. soldiers. During sentencing, Justice Bernd von Heintschel-Heinegg said Mohammed's...

German Proposes Tagging Islamic Militants By REUTERS BERLIN, Dec. 28 (Reuters) - Known Islamic militants should be electronically tagged so their movements could be tracked, a regional German interior minister proposed Wednesday. "This would allow us to monitor the roughly 3,000 Islamists who are prone to violence, hate-preachers and fighters trained in terrorist camps," the Lower Saxony interior minister, Uwe Schünemann, said in an interview with the newspaper Die Welt. Mr. Schünemann said electronic tagging was a viable alternative to holding the militants in protective custody, as suggested by the former German interior minister, Otto Schily. Mr. Schünemann was quoted...

BERLIN (Reuters) - The German state of Bavaria banned a radical Islamist group on Wednesday, saying materials seized from its offices urged Muslims to murder Jews and Christians. "With today's ban of the Multi-Kultur-Haus (MKH) association, Bavaria is making the limits clear to supporters of foreign extremist organisations," the state's interior minister, Guenther Beckstein, said in a statement. He said authorities raided the association's offices on Wednesday morning and seized a number of items. As the group is based in Bavaria, the ban effectively shuts it down. Bavarian authorities had been watching the MHK in the town of Neu-Ulm for...

A German court has sentenced four Arab men to prison terms ranging from five to eight years each Wednesday for plotting attacks on Jewish sites. Three of the men are Jordanians. They were convicted of supporting an al-Qaida group linked to Iraqi insurgent leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the BBC said.

The formation of a potentially deadly Islamic terror cell could have been prevented if German immigration laws had been implemented correctly, the judge in a high-profile terror case said on Wednesday. Judge Ottmar Breidling criticised “incredible irregularities” by the government body that deals with foreigners, when he sentenced four Arab men for their role in a plot to bomb Jewish targets in Germany. He said the trial, which started in February 2004, “would not have been required if laws concerning foreigners had been implemented properly”. Mr Breidling said several of the accused had been convicted for drug trafficking and should...

DÜSSELDORF, Germany — Prosecutors yesterday demanded jail terms of up to eight years for four Arab men accused of planning to bomb Jewish targets in Germany under orders from al-Qaida in Iraq leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Prosecutor Christian Monka said three of the men were members of a terrorist organization that planned to attack two restaurants in Düsseldorf, Germany, and a community center in Berlin. The fourth is accused of helping them. Evidence in the long-running trial, which started in February 2004, includes wiretapped conversations in which Jordanian Zarqawi, using code words, discusses with group members the state of preparations...