Germans Urged to Speed Up Crackdown

A month after terror attacks in the United States that were at least partially plotted in this city, the German investigation is coming under increasing criticism for being slow and bureaucratic.

No arrests have been made here in connection with the Sept. 11 assaults, despite a growing web of circumstantial evidence linking Hamburg residents to suspected attack mastermind Osama bin Laden.

And in contrast to the hundreds of detentions and interrogations in the United States, German police have interviewed only a handful of suspects and searched fewer than 20 residences.

The results reflect a fundamental difference with the United States in defining the circumstances under which someone living in Germany can be deprived of liberty and made to explain associations with felons.

Two longtime German residents--a Syrian-born businessman in Hamburg and an Egyptian surgeon in the southern city of Ulm--had economic and religious links to a key Bin Laden figure, Mamdouh Mahmud Salim, yet neither was taken in for questioning after the attacks.

The Hamburg connection, Mamoun Darkazanli, has dropped out of sight. The doctor, Adly el-Attar, has returned to Sudan, where he used to live, his colleagues told investigators.

Darkazanli had been under periodic surveillance by authorities since 1998, when Salim was arrested on a U.S. warrant in connection with the embassy bombings earlier that year in Kenya and Tanzania. The naturalized German co-signed a bank account for Salim, ostensibly to allow him to set up an Arabic-language radio station. Salim now awaits trial in connection with the bombings.

Darkazanli’s name also came up during the trial earlier this year of another suspect in the embassy bombings, Wadih El-Hage, who had used Darkazanli’s home address on his business card. El-Hage also had a Hamburg bank account, according to evidence submitted at his trial. He was convicted of conspiracy in the bombings.

During his 1998 interrogation before being extradited to the United States, Salim described El-Attar as a longtime friend. El-Attar also was questioned in 1998, but not since the Sept. 11 attacks.

ZDF television reported that authorities searched El-Attar’s apartment Saturday, prompting speculation that he was connected with the Hamburg terror suspects. The broadcast said El-Attar left for Sudan on Sept. 20.

Sources familiar with the probe say that U.S. investigators, including a dozen or so FBI agents, are at times impatient with the bureaucracy in a country where state and federal bodies lack coordination, and at times even cooperation.

Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder’s office has called in federal prosecutor Kay Nehm to urge more aggressive pursuit of suspects and leads in the Sept. 11 attacks, German media reported, quoting sources in the chancellery. Nehm also has been told to widen the investigation to review the entire network of known Bin Laden accomplices, the reports said.

German authorities contend that they are simply following the law. Some note with irony that the cumbersome division of responsibility and checks on power were designed by U.S. and other Allied lawyers in the late 1940s to prevent abuse of law enforcement, as occurred during the Third Reich.

The glaring international spotlight also has upset Germany’s political equilibrium.

The pacifist Greens, who share power with Schroeder’s Social Democrats, are fighting conservative calls for curtailed civil liberties and privacy protections in the hunt for terrorists, such as computer profiling of suspects and reduced sentences for those willing to testify against others.

Interior Minister Otto Schily, a Social Democrat, has been trying to steer German citizens away from acting out of panic. He dismissed as “unhelpful” a proposal to draft a policy on whether hijacked civilian airliners should be shot down if they appear to be threatening populations on the ground.

In reaction to the U.S. scare over anthrax cases discovered in Florida, Schroeder’s office Wednesday created an information center for biological threats. “Ever since Sept. 11, we’ve had to think about the unthinkable,” said Uwe-Karsten Heye, Schroeder’s spokesman.

Within a few hours, police were called in to investigate envelopes found in a Berlin parking garage and at a U.S. company in Hesse state. The envelopes contained powdery substances and were marked with warnings suggesting that they might hold anthrax spores. Police discounted the incidents as false alarms.

The most visible step taken by law enforcement has been widespread profiling. But anti-terrorism experts have dismissed the move as a waste of already strained police resources.

Court-ordered profiling parameters in Hesse, for example, cover all people ages 18 to 40 with Islamic religious affiliation who were or are students, have neither police records nor children, are financially independent and come from one of 21 specified countries.

Frankfurt criminal lawyer Walther Graf, regarded as one of the few German experts in counter-terrorism, told the daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung that such an approach was a “disaster,” since it would produce a list of every student of Islamic belief, necessitating follow-up checks on tens of thousands of people.

A university dean, who recently was contacted by police for information on one of the three Hamburg students identified by the FBI as suicide hijackers in the Sept. 11 attacks, said German investigators conceded that they didn’t know what they were looking for.

Frauke Katrin Scheuten, spokeswoman for the federal prosecutor’s office in Karlsruhe, said there are “fundamental differences” between Germany and the United States in what constitutes grounds for arrest.

Refusing to discuss in detail the cases of Darkazanli or El-Attar, she said that in general, “contact alone is not enough for us to arrest someone.” She reiterated that German authorities have no evidence of criminal wrongdoing by either man.

Hamburg police say they would have long ago arrested anyone with identifiable criminal ties to the Sept. 11 suspects.

“The idea that you can clear up the causes of a major terrorist attack like this in a couple of weeks is simply naive,” said Christoph Holstein, spokesman for Hamburg Police Chief Olaf Scholz.