German Hunt for Terrorists Haunted by Past

It’s not that authorities failed to notice the spreading tentacles of fundamentalist Islam in this port city with 270,000 foreigners, many of them refugees from religious and ethnic conflicts roiling the world from Afghanistan to the Gaza Strip.

But with drugs, prostitution and smuggling already branding their city Germany’s “Crime Central,” Hamburg police were overwhelmed with the everyday mayhem of a seething metropolis. And under a constitution designed to redress law enforcement’s repression of Jews during the Nazi era, police are severely restricted in probing groups defined by faith.

Until Sept. 11, when the threat of Islamic extremism became a shocking reality, Germany’s guardians of public security were almost universally focused on right-wing radicals. Now, law enforcement in Hamburg and the rest of the country are hamstrung by suddenly shifted priorities, as well as a shortage of resources, as they feverishly probe the terrorist networks.

That so far there have been no arrests in connection with the attacks in the city where the crimes are believed to have been plotted is withering testimony, authorities concede, to a law enforcement system shaped with an eye on past evils, not those of the present.

Because the intelligence service is structured on a state level, leads and clues gathered in one state don’t get passed on to colleagues in another. And to prevent abuses of civil rights, as occurred on a mass scale during the Third Reich, the constitution prohibits intelligence agents’ access to information about individual searches or interrogations.

At least two figures in the emerging network of suspects had earlier come to official attention here: Said Bahaji, a German of Moroccan origin accused of aiding the three known suicide hijackers with links to Hamburg, and local businessman Mamoun Darkazanli, who opened a bank account for an alleged associate of Saudi exile Osama bin Laden six years ago.

Investigators so far have been unable to tie the Syrian-born Darkazanli with the Hamburg terrorist cell, said Manfred Murck, deputy chief of the Hamburg branch of the Office for Protection of the Constitution, Germany’s domestic intelligence network. He said lack of resources and the separation of powers built into Germany’s law enforcement system are impeding the investigation.

“We have found out too late for this tragedy, but it is clear now that the ability to exchange information among agencies in Germany and with international associates is in grave need of improvement,” he said.

Bahaji was under surveillance long before the U.S. attacks because he had been identified as someone with extremist views and contacts. But agents never detected criminal activity or intent that would have justified closer watch, Murck said.

“We know the mosques where a lot of radicals meet. We know the scenes where recruitment might be possible. But we don’t have the resources to be following every possibility on the radical left scene and the radical right and radical Islam all at the same time,” he said.

Intelligence forces were formerly deployed to identify and root out right-wing extremism, but now all resources are being devoted to the Islamic terrorism investigation, said Hans-Juergen Adomeit, chief of analysis for the intelligence service.

“If an asylum seekers’ home is set on fire tomorrow, people will be screaming to know why we weren’t watching out for that,” Adomeit said. “And all we’ll be able to say is that we were working on the Islamic threat today.”

The Hamburg office has had its personnel reduced from 200 a decade ago to 122 today, and many of the remaining staff are data processors and analysts, not agents capable of street work and precautionary surveillance, Murck said.

At the federal domestic intelligence agency, staff has been cut from 2,435 in 1990 to 2,085 today.

“It’s difficult enough to conduct surveillance in the Islamic world because of the cultural and religious barriers. We would need someone with the right languages, and even then it is difficult to get people to talk to us for fear of bringing harm to fellow believers,” Murck said.

Hamburg Police Chief Olaf Scholz agrees that German law enforcement has collectively let its guard down in the decade since East and West Germany were reunited. For the terrorism probe, federal agents have augmented his forces, but this was managed only because the investigation was immediately deemed likely to cross state borders.

Even with the loan of 50 extra police officers to retrace the steps of the suspected suicide hijackers, authorities here have largely come up empty-handed, having had too little contact with the Islamic communities before Sept. 11 and now perceived to be on a Muslim witch hunt.

To tighten security, German law enforcement agencies have begun conducting “screen searches,” a residence-by-residence computer scan to identify potential terrorists--that is, those matching a particular profile. Police have refused to disclose the exact details of the profile, but adherence to the Muslim faith and origins from an Islamic country are known to be among them.

“You can’t talk about Muslims in a homogenous way,” warned Horst Tietjens, research director for Hamburg’s Office of Foreigners’ Affairs. “Just among the Turks here there are 52 different minorities.”

As a city official charged with enhancing integration of the Muslim communities here, Tietjens has more extensive contacts with and understanding of the cultures than law enforcement. That familiarity has given rise to some theories about how devout believers can be transformed into fanatics in an environment of tolerance and diversity.

“These men tend to turn to their religion more here than at home because this is a place where faith is neglected,” Tietjens said of Hamburg, renowned for its Reeperbahn red-light district and thriving drug trade. “They are turned off by the wanton environment and seek reassurance from fellow believers. If they come into the company of fundamentalists, they get confirmation of this rejection.”

Among the biggest Muslim communities in Hamburg are the 22,000 Afghans, spanning the political spectrum from backers of Mohammed Zahir Shah, the monarch exiled in 1973, to supporters of the harsh Taliban government.

Earlier this year, the Taliban’s health minister, Mohammed Abbas Akhund, visited Hamburg and Frankfurt to collect money for alleged charitable causes, said Ghulam-Sakhi Saheem, an Afghan businessman who fled his homeland 20 years ago, when it was under Soviet occupation.

Germany’s ARD television station claimed Akhund was also on a recruitment drive for Bin Laden, but Afghans here said they were unaware of any involvement or contact with the hijacking suspects.

“Afghans themselves are not involved in terrorism. They’ve been through too much terror in their own country,” said Zia Salehi of the Council for Afghans in Northern Germany. “Afghans who think like the Taliban can’t survive here in Europe. They need to go someplace where they can live in the 15th century.”