Intelligence Chief says Sept. 11 Attacks not Planned in Hamburg
October 25, 2003
Heinz Fromm, the head of Germany’s domestic intelligence agency, told a court in Hamburg on Friday that he believed the devastating terrorist attacks that leveled New York’s World Trade Center were planned by the Islamic extremist group al Qaeda in Afghanistan in the late 1990s.
"The September 11 attacks were not planned in Hamburg, rather, as far as we know, this happened in Afghanistan," Fromm told the court.
Fromm was testifying in a case against 30 year-old Moroccan Abdelghani Mzoudi, who is suspected of aiding the extremists that carried out the suicide hijackings of four U.S. airliners. He faces over 3,000 counts of being an accessory to murder and membership in a terrorist organization.
Fromm said German intelligence believed the three suicide pilots that lived in Hamburg had been recruited in Afghanistan in late 1999. Defense lawyers called for the trial against Mzoudi to be dismissed, saying Fromm’s testimony undermines the prosecutors’ allegations that the September 11 attacks were orchestrated and carried out by the al Qaeda terror cell based in Hamburg.
"What the witness has just told the court is diametrically opposed to what the prosecution claims," said defense lawyer Michael Rosenthal. The prosecution contended Fromm’s testimony did not contradict their case, which is pinned on aiding, not just planning, the attacks. Another Moroccan, Mounir El-Motassadeq, was sentenced in February to the maximum 15 years in prison on similar charges.
Bin Laden personally involved
According to German weekly news magazine Der Spiegel, al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden personally picked suicide pilots Mohammed Atta, Marwan al Shehi and Ziad Jarrah after the three -- who had originally hoped to fight the Russians in Chechnya -- had settled in Afghanistan.
The magazine reported on Saturday that U.S. interrogators had obtained detailed confessions from the suspected Sept. 11 masterminds Khalid Sheikh Mohammed und Ramzi Binalshibh, who had both offered enough information to piece together how the attacks had been planned.
Der Spiegel said the plot to use airplanes as weapons against U.S. targets was hatched as early as 1996. Mohammed’s first plan was to use small planes loaded with explosives, but bin Laden reportedly dismissed that idea in favor of hijacking large passenger planes with the question: "Why swing an axe when you can use a bulldozer?"
Atta, who piloted the first plane into the World Trade Center, and at least two other Hamburg-based hijackers in 1999 where picked for a “very secret mission” since they could speak English and were familiar with the western world. At that point they did not yet know what they would do, but were told to take flight training.
In February 2001, Binalshibh was given the target list, which included the U.S. Capitol building in Washington D.C. Shortly thereafter, Binalshibh and Atta picked the codeword “Porsche 911” for the plot.
Besides hitting the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington on Sept. 11, 2001, one of four hijacked planes went down in a field in Pennsylvania after the passengers attempted to overpower the terrorists.