Author:
Publication: Spiegel.de
Date: August 9, 2010
URL: http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,710845,00.html
German police on Monday closed a mosque that
had been a meeting place for the 9/11 terror cell. They believe the mosque
continued to promote jihad and may have been a staging site for Islamist extremists
living in Germany who have traveled to Afghanistan and Pakistan to participate
in militant camps.
Hamburg authorities on Monday closed the Taiba
mosque, which had been the place of worship for the terrorist cell responsible
for the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on New York and Washington. The city said the
mosque had been closed in response to a ban that had been applied to the Arab
cultural association which ran it, called the Arab-German Cultural Association.
The city said it would provide further details
at a press conference to take place later in the day, but news agency Agence
France Presse is reporting that the organization had been accused of recruiting
jihadists in Germany.
Twenty police and several undercover investigators
marched up to the building early on Monday morning and removed the locks using
a drill. "The investigators are searching the mosque for further evidence
and are seizing computers and other equipment," a spokesperson said.
Formerly known as the Al-Quds mosque, Taiba
was the meeting place of several of the perpetrators on the 9/11 terror attacks.
Officials at Hamburg's Office for the Protection of the Constitution, the
state intelligence agency, say that the Taiba mosque continues to be the main
pole of attraction for the local jihadist scene, with around 45 members.
Investigators believe that the mosque was
the base used in the past year by a group of 10 Hamburg-base jihadists who
traveled to Pakistan or Afghanistan, purportedly to participate in military
training camps. They claim that at least one of those men later became a part
of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IBU) terrorist group in Pakistan.
