Islamic terrorists planning a massacre in Germany on the anniversary of the September 11 attacks phoned British contacts as they plotted, it has emerged.
| Welcome to the e-Caliphate... |
They planned to strike at German airports and US bases exactly six years after hijacked planes ploughed into the World Trade Centre.
| Coincidentally the anniversary of the Gates of Vienna. |
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.
| That'll bleach a lotta hair... |
Several calls to British numbers are said to been made from mobile telephones linked to two of the men being questioned in Germany. One is said to have been a "known" number.
| Betcha the number belongs to a Pak... |
Prosecutors and police painted a picture of a ruthless cell of Al-Qaeda-linked fanatics, willing to die in suicide attacks with bombs more powerful than those used in the July 7 attacks in London in 2005. Prosecutors said the attacks were planned at Frankfurt airport, Germany's biggest and busiest, and the Ramstein Airbase - the Pentagon's largest outside of the US. Other US bases, civilian airports, a nightclub and pub were on the terrorists' target list.
| Nightclubs and pubs are places where people go to relax, enjoy themselves. They've even been know to laugh in such places. |
Germany's chief prosecutor, Monika Harms, said the plan was to construct massive car bombs and cause "as much loss of life as possible".
| It's a religious requirement... |
"We have stopped what would certainly have been the worst terror attacks in Germany," he added. The men had been under surveillance for months from agents of the BND, Germany's MI5, and the elite GSG-9 police commandos who are trained along SAS-lines.
| BND (Bundesnachrichtendeinst, give or take a spelling error or two, literally "Federal Information Office") is the analytic end. GSG-9 is the more athletic of the two. |
American intelligence officials were also in on the surveillance but played no part in the arrests.
| We have friendly relations with BND... |
 On Tuesday, authorities swooped at a hideout in the village of Oberschledorn in North Rhine-Westphalia where the "bomb factory" was located. One of the suspects broke out of a bathroom window and bolted into woodland, where he wrestled with a police officer and managed to take his gun.
| That is usually not a healthy thing to do, especially if there are other coppers nearby. |
A shot was fired but no one was hit. The policeman and his colleagues overpowered the suspect.
| ... rather than shooting him to dollrags... |
All three suspects were arrested.
| We're hoping it wasn't a gentle process.. |
Forty other homes and offices across Germany were raided at the same time. As well as the chemical mixtures, police discovered military detonators. German defence minister Franz Josef Jung said: "The attacks were planned for the near future. They presented a direct threat to life."
| The turbans actually aren't very big on anniversary celebrations - they're un-Islamic - unless they're of something that happened a few hundred years ago that most of us have forgotten about. They've actually got a point; there are only 365 days in a year, and something's happened somewhere every day. |
The group had been under surveillance ever since one was spotted spying the US barracks at Hanau on New Year's Eve last year. Email traffic between them and others abroad led to the authorities' action five days before the anniversary of 9/11.
| Which was probably supposed to be the blowoff... |
Der Spiegel, the respected German news magazine, was among media outlets which reported the terrorists were gearing up for attacks on that day.
| Whoa. Took some deep thinking to come to that conclusion, didn't it? |
Last night British anti-terror officers were checking for links between the men held in Germany and British-Pakistani terror suspects who may have trained with them. Officers from Scotland Yard flew to Germany to assist the investigation. They want to examine any possible links with UK terror plots. The details of the men are also to be shown to Al Qaeda supergrass Mohammad Babar, who trained with Britons at terror camps, by US officials and to extremists in British jails.
Al Qaeda and jihadi bomb makers are known to have taught Britons how to use hydrogen peroxide at camps in Pakistan attended by other Europeans. It has featured as a key component of al Qaeda-linked bombers at least twice in Britain. It was used by the four July 7 suicide bombers in the bombs that killed 52 on the London transport network. It was also to have been used two weeks later in the copycat attacks by four more Islamic fundamentalists intent on bringing slaughter to the capital's streets. But the rucksack bombs failed to go off. The plotters were jailed earlier this year.
A man identified as being the group's leader, Fritz G, 28, is from Ulm in southern Germany, where he is understood to have worked at the city's Islamic Information Centre after converting to Islam. Germany routinely does not issue the last names of criminal suspects. The other German, Daniel S, 22, is also a Muslim convert and comes from Saarbruecken on the border with France. The third man is a Turk named Adem Y, 29, who lives in Frankfurt. They were members of a group called Islamic Jihad Union. Spawned in Uzbekistan, it was described by a senior German lawman as a "franchise" of al Qaeda with close ties to Osama Bin Laden's terror corporation. The men, radicalised over what they saw as the oppression of Muslims worldwide by America and her allies, have apparently been confessing to interrogators. |