Federal appeals panel upholds Muslim student’s conviction

2/8/2008
By CINDY GEORGE
Staff

A three-judge federal appeals panel this week upheld a Muslim student’s conviction last year on a weapons charge linked to a Houston-based plan to aid the Taliban.

Shiraz Syed Qazi, 27, was sentenced in May to 10 months in federal prison for unlawful possession of a firearm. He was released in September after receiving credit for time served pending trial.

Qazi was one of four Muslim students accused of training to join the terrorist group’s fight against U.S.-led forces overseas.

A July 2005 camping trip in Willis, north of Conroe, was part of a government sting to nab men who discussed fighting with the Taliban and engaged in military-style training. FBI agents used Qazi’s admission that “he overheard statements over that weekend” to connect him to the plot.

Qazi, a Pakistani, was photographed with a semi-automatic rifle.

At the time, he was attending Houston Community College on a student visa.

Prosecutors contend that Qazi was convicted because federal law prohibits someone who is not a U.S. citizen from possessing a firearm.

“The 5th Circuit followed well-established case law,” said Assistant U.S. Attorney Glenn Cook, who prosecuted. “Should it get to the Supreme Court, I expect they will do the same.”

On appeal, federal public defender Brent Newton argued that there wasn’t enough evidence to convict Qazi because the government did not prove that the foreign student knew his immigration status precluded him from having a gun – and because the offense would not be viewed as a criminal act by the average person.

Qazi was not charged with supporting the Taliban or any other terrorism charge, but he does face deportation.

 http://www.chron.com/CDA/archives/archive.mpl?id=2008_4510503

Oct. 19, 2007, 10:04PM
Student faces more charges in ‘battlefield jihad’ case

By CINDY GEORGE
Copyright 2007 Houston Chronicle

Federal prosecutors have filed additional charges against Adnan Mirza, one of the four Muslim students accused of preparing to join the Taliban to fight U.S.-led forces overseas.

Mirza, 30, was accused of planning to engage in “battlefield jihad” in the Middle East and financially supporting the terrorism group.

Here on a student visa, the Pakistani originally was charged in a four-count indictment with Kobie Williams, a U.S. citizen attending the University of Houston-Downtown. Williams, 34, pleaded guilty to a conspiracy charge last year and awaits sentencing.

The new 13-count indictment names Mirza alone and more completely outlines the allegations against him.

The charges include 10 firearm possession offenses, the alleged purchase of ammunition at a gun show for use during a paramilitary exercise and two conspiracy counts related to the training and financial support. He is accused of failing to secure a work visa before starting a job and overstaying his visa.

The indictment also alleges that $1,000 earmarked for Taliban fighters and their families passed through Mirza’s hands.

Mirza, who had been studying biomedical technology at Houston Community College before his arrest last November, engaged in firearms training eight times at Houston-area campsites and shooting ranges from May 2005 through June 2006, the indictment alleges.

cindy.george@chron.com

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/metropolitan/5230281.html

Al Qaeda leader’s call for jihad could add to political troubles of U.S.-allied president

Griff Witte, Washington Post

Friday, September 21, 2007

(09-21) 04:00 PDT Islamabad, Pakistan –

Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden took direct aim at faltering Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf in a recording released Thursday that could portend greater instability for the nation at a time when it is already experiencing deep political turmoil.

Bin Laden, who is believed to be hiding in Pakistan’s remote tribal regions, was unusually single-minded in the new 23-minute recording. He focused his wrath almost exclusively on the U.S.-allied general, and called on Pakistanis to rise up in revolt.

“I tell Pervez and his army: Your betrayal of your nation and people has been exposed,” bin Laden said, adding later that it was the duty of Pakistan’s Muslims to “carry out jihad and fighting to remove Pervez, his government, his army and those who help him.”

The message from bin Laden was his third this month, and it followed by a day the release of a recording from al Qaeda deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri that also threatened Musharraf. U.S. intelligence officials continued to study the new tapes but said they appeared to be authentic.

The tapes seemed to underline Pakistan’s evolving status as a prime target for al Qaeda, in addition to being the organization’s operational base. The country’s military, led by Musharraf, has long had links to radical Islamic organizations but is now seen as the enemy by those groups because of the president’s U.S. ties.

With moderate Pakistanis pushing him for a return to democracy, Musharraf has become increasingly isolated, and is now struggling for political survival. Meanwhile, his military is reeling from punishing losses inflicted by insurgents in attacks across the northwest of this predominantly Muslim country.

More than 200 troops taken hostage by the Taliban late last month are still being held. More are kidnapped almost daily, with mutilated, uniformed bodies later dumped along roadsides. Last week, a suicide bomber penetrated one of the most heavily fortified military installations in the country, killing 15 elite commandos. The week before that, a bomber left 18 dead when he detonated an explosive he wore on a bus carrying workers from the nation’s powerful spy agency, Inter-Services Intelligence.

Two peace deals between the Pakistani government and locals in the Waziristan tribal areas collapsed earlier this summer. Since then, the military has been casting about for a new strategy to fight an increasingly unpopular battle against extremists.

On Thursday, a senior Bush administration official was dismissive of the threat against Musharraf and expressed continued U.S. support for the man still widely regarded as a critical ally in the war against terrorism.

“He can threaten whoever he wants,” Tom Casey, the State Department’s deputy spokesman, said of bin Laden. “We’re going to continue to work with Pakistan, as well as our other friends and allies throughout the world, to confront him and make sure that we keep ourselves and our friends safe from attack from him and those like him.”

Musharraf, who has survived several assassination attempts linked to al Qaeda, has lately been distracted by his own political problems. The government announced Thursday that presidential elections will be held Oct. 6. But with just over two weeks to go, much about the election, and about Musharraf’s future, remains in doubt.

The president is believed to have the votes he needs in the parliament and provincial assemblies to win a new five-year term. But the Supreme Court could rule him ineligible, with opposition lawyers arguing that Musharraf’s other job as army chief disqualifies him.

Political opponents, who are pushing for a return to civilian rule eight years after a military-led coup brought Musharraf to power, have protested his decision to seek another term from the current assemblies, which came to office in tainted elections in 2002, and have threatened to quit parliament.

“Instead of finding a legitimate, constitutional way out of a mess of his own making, Musharraf has once again opted for an illegal path to the presidency,” the advocacy group Human Rights Watch said Thursday in a statement.

This article appeared on page A – 3 of the San Francisco Chronicle

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2007/09/21/MNC6SACTL.DTL

Please visit Realterror to comment on this article!

U. S. Department of Justice

U. S. Attorney’s Office
Southern District of Texas
Donald J. DeGabrielle, Jr. •United States Attorney

(HOUSTON, TEXAS) – Syed Maaz Shah, 20, a Pakistani national in the United States on a student visa, was sentenced today for two counts of unlawful possession of a firearm, United States Attorney Don DeGabrielle announced today.

Convicted by a Houston jury in approximately one hour following the three-day trial before United States District Judge Melinda Harmon in May 2007, Shah was sentenced to serve 78 months in prison to be followed by three years of supervised release. In arriving at this sentence, Harmon upwardly departed from the 21 to 27 month sentence Shah faced under the United States sentencing guidelines. Shah will likely be deported from the United States upon completion of his prison term. Shah has been in federal custody since his arrest in November 2006.

“This case demonstrates the United States’ continued efforts to detect, disrupt and dismantle groups of individuals contemplating and training with an eye toward jeopardizing our national security,” DeGabrielle stated.

During the trial, the United States introduced photographs of Shah holding and firing an Armalite M-15, .223 caliber semi automatic rifle during firearms training sessions held over the weekends of Jan. 13 and March 10, 2006, on private property located near Willis, Texas. Through the testimony of an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent, the United States proved that Shah, a citizen of Pakistan, last entered the United States in August 2005 as an F-1 student visa holder. Given Shah’s status as a non-immigrant student visa holder, Shah is prohibited by federal law from possessing a firearm. A special agent of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATFE) further related that the Armalite M-15 possessed by Shah in January and March 2006 was operable and manufactured in Illinois and thus, traveled in interstate commerce.

In finding the defendant guilty, the jury rejected Shah’s claim that undercover officials working with the Houston Joint Terrorism Task Force impermissibly entrapped Shah. In arguing Shah was not entrapped, but rather, was predisposed to commit the firearms violations, the United States presented evidence that at the time of Shah’s arrest Nov. 28, 2006, Shah orally confessed he had an interest in weapons and had engaged in the firearms training weekends to prepare for “what may come.” Shah went on to state that he viewed American forces in Iraq as “invaders” and felt it was his duty to prepare for “Jihad,” described during the trial as armed combat. The United States also presented evidence showing that Shah had literature regarding Jihad on his computer, seized by FBI personnel at the time of Shah’s arrest.

During Shah’s testimony, he claimed he did not give an oral confession to the FBI, that many people had access to his laptop computer and that he went to Willis “to fish” on Jan. 13-14 and March 10-11, 2006. In fact, Shah denied knowing that firearms training would occur over the January weekend.

The United States offered multiple recordings made by an undercover police official which demonstrated Shah’s interest and knowledge that the January and March weekends would focus on military-style firearms and combat training. One of the recordings revealed Shah had paid $30 for ammunition prior to engaging in the military-style combat training and target practice Jan. 14, 2006. The recordings further revealed Shah and his companions, which included Houston residents Kobie Williams and Adnan Mirza, attended the second training session in March 2006, again for the purpose of participating in military-style training.

Williams pleaded guilty Nov. 28, 2006, to conspiracy charges relating to funds earmarked for the Taliban and related firearms offenses. Williams is scheduled for sentencing Oct. 12, 2007. Mirza, also charged with conspiracy and firearms offenses, is scheduled for trial Oct. 29, 2007. A related defendant, Shiraz Syed Qazi, a nonimmigrant F-1 student visa holder who also attended the Willis firearms training camp, was sentenced May 17, 2007, to 10 months incarceration for his unlawful possession of a firearm.

The investigation was led by the FBI and the agency’s Joint Terrorism Task Force with participation by ATFE, ICE, the Houston Police Department and the Texas Department of Public Safety. Assistant United States Attorneys Shelley J. Hicks and Glenn Cook prosecuted the case.

# # #

http://houston.fbi.gov/dojpressrel/pressrel07/ho09172007.htm

Pakistani Student Sentenced for Firearms Violations

   Armalite M15 Assault Rifle

September 17, 2007

The FBI has announced the sentencing of Syed Maaz Shah, 20, who is a Pakistani national and in the United States on a student visa. He was sentenced on two counts of unlawful possession of a firearm.

It took a jury in Houston, Texas an hour to find him guilty, after a three day trial. Shah has been sentenced to serve 78 months, which is six and a half years in prison. When he is released, he will have another three years of supervised release. The judge gave him a harsh sentence, since the sentencing guide lines are from 21 to 27 months. He will most likely be deported after his prison sentence is complete.

The evidence presented at trial included photographs of Shah holding as well as firing an Armalite M-15, .223 caliber semi automatic rifle. He did this on private property near the town of Willis, Texas on two weekends, one being the weekend of Jan 13 and the other the weekend of March 10, 2006.

The testimony provided by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent proved that he last entered the United States in August 2005 as an F-1 student visa holder.

Under the classification of a non immigrant student, he was prohibited from possessing a firearm.

Further testimony from a special agent of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATFE) showed that the Armalite M-15 possessed by Shah in January and March 2006 was operable and manufactured in Illinois. This meant it had traveled in interstate commerce and that is a federal crime.

The jury rejected his claim that he was entrapped by undercover officers with the Houston Joint Terrorism Task Force. The government countered with the argument that he was not entrapped but he was predisposed to commit the firearms violations. To prove the fact, they presented evidence to the effect that at the time of his arrest, Shah gave an oral confession to the effect that he had an interest in weapons and had taken training for “what may come.” He went on to further state that he viewed the American forces in Iraq as invaders. He also said he thought it was his duty to prepare for Jihad. Evidence was also presented showing that he had literature about Jihad on his computer, which was seized by the FBI at the time of his arrest.

Shah testified that he did not give the oral confession and that there were many other people who had access to his computer. He also said the purpose of his visit to Willis was to go fishing. He also denied knowing that there would be firearms training over the weekend in January.

The government put many recordings into evidence that were made by an undercover police official which showed that Shah’s interest in and knowledge of those weekends were that there would be military style firearms can combat training. One of the recordings showed that he had paid $30 for ammunition before he went to the site on Jan14, 2006. The recordings also slowed that Shah and his companions, namely Houston residents Kobie Williams and Adnan Mirza, all attended the second training session in March 2006.

William previously pleaded guilty to conspiracy charges in relation to funds that were supposed to go to the Taliban. He also pleaded guilty to firearms offenses.
Mirza was also charged with conspiracy and firearms offenses. He is scheduled to go to trial on Oct. 29, 2007.

Another defendant, Shiraz Syed Qazi is another nonimmigrant student who also attended the sessions. He was sentenced to ten months for unlawful possession of a firearm.

http://www.associatedcontent.com/image/147064/index.html

Published Monday, September 10, 2007
Europeans Get Terror Training Inside Pakistan

SOUAD MEKHENNET and MICHAEL MOSS

FRANKFURT, Sept. 9 — The accused conspirators in a bombing plot disrupted last week in Germany were part of what the authorities say is a small, but growing, flow of militants from Germany and other Western countries who are receiving terrorism training at camps in Pakistan.

Beginning early last year, at least five of the suspects traveled to the tribal regions of Waziristan, where they learned to prepare chemical explosives and military-grade detonators that they intended to use to build three car bombs, according to German officials and a confidential German intelligence document that details the allegations.

The authorities said the man they had identified as the leader of the plot, Fritz Martin Gelowicz, 28, apparently found his way to the camp in Waziristan through contacts he made at an Islamic center he attended in Neu-Ulm, Germany. Other suspects in the suspected conspiracy then followed Mr. Gelowicz to the camp, where their instructors included militant Islamists from Uzbekistan who are aligned with Al Qaeda, according to the confidential document.

As further evidence of traffic between Germany and the tribal areas of Pakistan, intelligence officials said six other men from Germany who had received similar training had been detained in Pakistan, and they suspect that numerous other Germans have attended the camps without being identified by the authorities.

German officials say they are troubled by evidence that Al Qaeda and other groups are training Western-born recruits whose passports allow them easy access to other Western countries.

“They started to look especially for people from Europe, because they wanted to train them and later to use them here in Germany for operations,” said a high-ranking German intelligence official who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the continuing investigation.

The accusations in Germany contain similarities to two high-profile cases in Britain.

The leader of the suicide bombers who killed 52 people in the 2005 London subway and bus attacks trained at a camp in northwestern Pakistan, according to court papers. Four British men convicted in April of planning fertilizer-bomb attacks around London also trained in Pakistan camps, according to court papers in the case, known as Operation Crevice.

This summer militants released a 46-minute videotape depicting some 250 graduates of a Taliban training camp near the Afghan-Pakistan border, which included speeches in English by recruits who were grouped by the countries they had been trained to attack, including Germany and the United States.

“We are not only fighting in Afghanistan,” the Taliban leader, Mullah Mansoor, said at the end of the ceremony. “Those American, British, German, French, Canadian and others who have come to finish us, if God wills, we will destroy them with the power of strong faith in God. We will commit suicidal attacks and we will destroy their national assets.”

German officials said they were relying largely on American and Pakistani intelligence to identify men who traveled to Waziristan, and while they declined to specify the nature of that intelligence, they said it was strong.

The amount of training under way in the tribal areas of Pakistan is difficult, if not impossible, to estimate, but intelligence officials are concerned about what they see as a trend toward terrorist groups recruiting Westerners.

In a speech in New York on Friday, the C.I.A. director, Gen. Michael V. Hayden, said, “We do see them working to train people whom you and I wouldn’t raise an eyebrow about if they were getting off the plane with us at Kennedy, people whose identity makes it easier — whose persona makes it easier for them to come into America and to blend into American society.”

The Pakistani government has recently acknowledged that Al Qaeda and other militants are operating in the tribal-controlled areas on its border with Afghanistan. Pakistan had struck an agreement with leaders in the South Waziristan tribal area, giving groups there amnesty as long as they refrained from attacking government installations and vehicles. But it broke down last month when the military began a new operation against the militants, which led to the capture of close to 300 Pakistani troops by the militants.

Even as Western governments and Pakistan try to crack down on terrorist training, their efforts are clashing with human rights groups in Pakistan that are pressing for the release of terrorism suspects who have been detained without being charged.

Pakistani courts recently released two Germans, who officials say they believe received explosives training in Waziristan, including a 45-year-old gem dealer who was designated a “potentially dangerous person” by the German police for threatening statements he made three days after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. He is back home in Germany, where officials say he has contacts with violent Islamic cells and has made several trips to the border area between Pakistan and Afghanistan.

He was arrested on June 18 by the Pakistani military intelligence agency, Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI, as he was boarding a plane in Lahore to fly back to Germany, and remained in detention for two months until the Supreme Court ruled there was insufficient evidence to continue holding him.

“There was no basis for the ISI to hold this man for two months,” said Amina Masood, an official with the Pakistani group Defense of Human Rights, which is pressing for the release of more than 400 people it has identified as being held by the ISI as terrorism suspects.

Ms. Masood said that the suspects included a handful of foreigners from Europe, Africa and the Middle East, and that several of the European detainees had been released in recent days, including men from Britain and Belgium.

The German intelligence document on the car-bombing plot, which was prepared by the authorities last week , details trips made by the German suspects to militant camps in Pakistan starting in early 2006.

The men trained in Waziristan with Uzbek militants belonging to a group known as the Islamic Jihad Union, which was designated a terrorist organization by the State Department in 2005.

Its predecessor, the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, financed by Osama bin Laden, had been Central Asia’s largest militant group until it went to Afghanistan to help the Taliban and was decimated by the American-led campaign after the Sept. 11 attacks. The successor group still had fighters in Afghanistan and had “also been working on our common targets together with Caucasian mujahedeens,” the group’s commander, Ebu Yahya Muhammad Fatih, said in a statement posted on the Internet in May 2007.

The involvement of members of the Uzbek group in militant training is particularly troubling, intelligence officials say, because of their expertise in explosives, and their use of women in suicide missions and of men who unwittingly drove car bombs.

In Pakistan, Maj. Gen. Waheed Arshad, the spokesman of the Pakistani military, acknowledged that Uzbeks were present in Waziristan, yet said the traffic of German nationals to Pakistan for terrorism training had not been confirmed.

But according to German intelligence officials, Mr. Gelowicz, who converted to Islam in his teens, most likely connected with the Uzbek group through the Multi-Kultur-Haus, the Islamic center in Neu-Ulm.

The center had close ties to the jihadist fighting in Chechnya, where three of its members died in combat. While German officials shut down the center in 2005, one of its imams, who fled to Saudi Arabia, continued to encourage jihadist activities by young men who had attended the center, German authorities say.

In Waziristan, Mr. Gelowicz formed a close relationship with the leaders of the Uzbek group, the German report says. A second man who joined him on that trip in March 2006, Adem Yilmaz, 28, who was born in Turkey, focused on bringing more men from Germany to be trained, the investigative report said.

They were followed in June by Atilla Selek, a 22-year-old man born in Ulm who the authorities say joined Mr. Gelowicz in December 2006 in scouting American military facilities in Hanau, Germany, the investigative report says. Mr. Selek, who goes by the name Muaz, is now in Turkey.

A fourth German man, Zafer Sari, 22, from Neunkirchen, went to the camps last summer, after attending a language school in Syria. Mr. Sari, who also has a Turkish passport, was in Turkey on June 21, when he left for Jordan and then Cairo. He is considered a suspect but is not in custody, according to the report and German officials.

The fifth suspect to train in the camps was Daniel Martin Schneider, 22, also from Neunkirchen. He went to Pakistan in August 2006 and also helped send other people to train there. Mr. Schneider was arrested last week as well.

The report says the Islamic Jihad Union has close ties to Al Qaeda, and evolved from a group with regional targets to sharing Al Qaeda’s goal of a worldwide jihadist movement. The Uzbeks have also been joined by militants from elsewhere in Central Asia, changing the ethnic complexion of the training camps.

http://www.tuscaloosanews.com/article/20070910/ZNYT03/709100333/1001/TL23

Southern German Towns Become Hub of Jihadism

Roland Ströbele | 17 Sep 2007
World Politics Review Exclusive

The arrest earlier this month of three Islamic radicals suspected of planning attacks on American military installations in Germany has again called attention to the southern German towns of Neu-Ulm and Ulm. The alleged leader of the trio, Fritz G., comes from Ulm. As Roland Ströbele of the local Neu-Ulmer Zeitung reports, the twin cities on opposite banks of the Danube have in recent years become a bustling hub of Jihadist activism.

NEU-ULM/ULM, Germany — And once again the trail leads to Neu-Ulm. One of the three presumed members of an Islamic terror group arrested earlier this month in Germany comes from Ulm. The 28-year-old Fritz G. is supposed even to have been the ringleader of the group, which is accused of planning bomb attacks on the Frankfurt Airport and the U.S. military base in Ramstein.

If the accusations should turn out to be true, then they provide renewed evidence that plans for terror attacks have been hatched in Ulm and Neu-Ulm and that it is from here that the terrorists have set out to realize their plans.

Fritz G. has been long known to Bavarian police authorities. The 28-year-old German converted to Islam several years ago and was a frequent visitor to the “Multi-Kultur-Haus” in Neu-Ulm, an Islamic cultural center that was shut down by the authorities in January 2006 on account of Islamist activism. According to investigators, radical “preachers of hate” frequented the Multi-Kultur-Haus, recruiting “holy warriors” for Jihad or collecting funds for the latter.

Incendiary writings, inciting hatred against Christians and Jews, were found among the materials seized by investigators in the Multi-Kultur-Haus. Simultaneous with the order to have the center shut down, the association that ran it was likewise banned. But the closing of the Multi-Kultur-Haus has hardly led to a diminution of Islamist activities in the region. The hardliners continue to meet in the so-called Islamic Information Center (IIZ) in Ulm. For the German domestic intelligence agency, the Verfassungsschutz, the IIZ remains the base of the Islamists.

It is hard to estimate just how large is the group of fanaticized and potentially violent militants, since new people are constantly turning up and others going into hiding. The German of Egyptian origins Khaled El-Masri [a.k.a. Khaled Al-Masri], who was abducted by the American intelligence services on account of his suspected terror ties, is also supposed to have been seen often at the Multi-Kultur-Haus. Masri lived in Senden, a suburb of Neu-Ulm.

As investigators reported earlier this month, an agreement had apparently been reached to ban the IIZ and the association that runs it at the same time as the Multi-Kultur-Haus was shut down. Why this failed to happen is a mystery for Bavarian authorities. [Note: Neu-Ulm is in Bavaria and Ulm is in the neighboring German state of Baden-Württemberg.]

As investigators likewise reported, Fritz G. had often met with the Egyptian Dr. Y. [Yehia Yousif] in his townhouse in the Neu-Ulm neighborhood of Ludwigsfeld. During a raid on the house, the police discovered materials that could be used for making bombs. Shortly before the Multi-Kultur-Haus was shut down, Dr. Y. went into hiding. The police suspect that he is currently in Saudi Arabia.

His son, Omar, was found to be in possession of handwritten instructions on how to ambush a military convoy. He claimed to have copied them from the Internet. Investigators, however, believe otherwise and are convinced that Omar Y. received training in armed combat in a Palestinian camp.

Just recently, the mayor of Neu-Ulm, Gerold Noerenberg, invited representatives of police agencies from both sides of the Danube to a closed conference on Islamism to discuss the situation. Participants in the conference report that appeals were made for greater vigilance in the face of Islamist activism.

There is no obvious answer as to why precisely the municipal center of Ulm/Neu-Ulm has become the base and meeting point for these religious fanatics. According to CIA reports, Bin Laden’s finance chief Mahmud Salim spent time in the area and the 9/11 terror pilot Mohammad Atta was also here. Other “holy warriors” have been incited by radical preachers to leave Ulm/Neu Ulm for the frontlines of Jihad.

Reda. S. [Reda Seyam], who is suspected of having co-financed the 2002 bomb attack on a Bali disco, lived in the area supported by welfare payments. And Tolga D., who was arrested some weeks ago after being deported from Pakistan, was a member of the IIZ in Ulm. Tolga D. is suspected of having recruited a German to take up arms in the cause of Jihad.

It is not for nothing that agents of the CIA have been active in the Ulm/Neu-Ulm area. As came out during the parliamentary investigations into the abduction of Khaled El-Masri, American agents were surprisingly well-informed about the Islamic scene in the region.

Over the years, a large number of religious fanatics and other “key and conspicuous persons” in the Islamist scene have settled in the area of Ulm/Neu-Ulm, where, from the banks of the Danube, they have continued to play a leading role in the international terrorist network. This might be the reason why Ulm/Neu-Ulm has become such a busy hub for radical imams and holy warriors. In any case, as one investigator observed, “it’s certainly not on account of the good travel connections . . .”

Roland Ströbele is a reporter for the Neu-Ulmer Zeitung. The above report first appeared in the Neu-Ulmer Zeitung on Sept. 6 and can be consulted in German here. The English translation is by John Rosenthal.

Image: The sign outside the Islamic Information Center in Ulm, Germany (video still from Report Mainz, SWR)

http://www.worldpoliticsreview.com/article.aspx?id=1142

German Authorities Close Islamic Center

AP — December 28, 2005

By STEPHEN GRAHAM

BERLIN – Authorities on Wednesday shut down an Islamic center once attended by a man who accuses the CIA of kidnapping him and sending him to a secret Afghan prison to be abused and interrogated.

The man’s lawyer has linked the alleged kidnapping to the investigation of extremist activity at the center.

The state government of Bavaria said Wednesday it was shutting down the Multi-Kultur-Haus association in the southern town of Neu-Ulm after it seized material urging Muslims to carry out suicide attacks in Iraq.

Khaled al-Masri, a Kuwait-born German citizen who is suing the CIA for allegedly spiriting him to Afghanistan for interrogation, has said he visited the center several times before he was snatched.

Al-Masri said he was taken while trying to enter Macedonia on New Year’s Eve 2003 and flown to Afghanistan, where he was subjected to “torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment” during five months in captivity, according to a lawsuit filed in a Virginia federal court.

He was flown to Albania in late May 2004 and put on a plane back to Germany, he has said.

Al-Masri has said his captors told him he was seized in a case of mistaken identity.

His lawyer, however, has suggested that al-Masri was abducted because of his links to the Islamic association, which provided meetings, prayer rooms and other services for local Muslims.

“In all interrogations, in Macedonia and Afghanistan, Khaled al-Masri was asked only about the Multi-Kultur-Haus in Ulm, about the people he knew there,” Manfred Gnjidic told Munich’s Abendzeitung newspaper last month.

Al-Masri’s case has stoked debate in Germany about how to prevent terrorist attacks while safeguarding civil liberties. Federal Interior Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble, for instance, is calling for tougher laws so that anyone who has trained in camps in Afghanistan can be prosecuted.

In remarks published Wednesday, Uwe Schuenemann, the interior minister of Lower Saxony state, floated a new idea: placing electronic tags on foreign extremists who cannot be deported to their countries of origin because they might be tortured.

“That would allow the observation of many of the roughly 3,000 potentially violent Islamists, hate preachers and fighters trained in foreign camps,” Schuenemann was quoted as saying in the daily Die Welt.

It was unclear whether federal officials would take up the suggestion. Electronic tags were used in 2000 on a trial basis in one German state with prisoners on parole, but have not been adopted more widely.

Al-Masri claims U.S. agents questioned him about associates including his friend Reda Seyam, an Egypt-born German citizen under investigation by German federal prosecutors on suspicion of supporting al-Qaida.

Al-Masri has denied any connection to terrorism.

Bavarian Interior Minister Guenther Beckstein told The Associated Press on Wednesday that investigators had noticed al-Masri visiting the Multi-Kultur-Haus but called him “rather a marginal figure.”

Beckstein’s ministry said the association was promoting extremist ideas and armed “holy war.”

Security officials confiscated and searched the association’s premises in Neu-Ulm Wednesday and froze its bank account. There was no mention of arrests or the results of the search.

Published on Wednesday 28 December 2005
Update Monday 4 June 2007

by Esebian

Article in PDF format

http://www.euro-islam.info/spip/article.php3?id_article=715

From Fritz to Adbullah: conversion shocks Germans

Nicholas Kulish and Souad Mekhennet, Ulm, Germany
September 8, 2007

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LEGALLY, his name is as German as they come: Fritz. To his confidants in the radical Islamic scene and alleged terrorist co-conspirators, he was Abdullah.

Fritz Gelowicz, 28, is in police custody, charged with leading a plot that, had it succeeded, could have surpassed the London bombings in its toll. That he is German and a youthful convert to Islam has only made it harder for his countrymen to grasp the accusation against him.

Intelligence officials say Gelowicz’s path led him through Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Syria, and to a terrorist training camp in Pakistan. Ultimately, it took him to a holiday home in Germany with chemicals to make explosives and military-grade detonators. There, investigators say, authorities finally brought to ground Gelowicz and two suspects said to be his associates, Daniel Martin Schneider and Adem Yilmaz.

That Gelowicz found the Islamic scene in Ulm, on the other hand, may have been the least shocking part of the unfolding tale. This unassuming city on the Danube River has for years enjoyed a reputation in Germany as the centre of a fiery Islamic movement. “It’s a combination of coincidence and favourable location” that made Ulm attractive to conspirators from the Islamist scene, the Mayor of Ulm, Ivo Goenner said.

The city sits on the border between the states of Baden-Wuerttemberg and Bavaria, with Ulm in the former and the sister town, Neu-Ulm, in the latter.

The Multi-Kultur-Haus, an Islamic centre on the Bavarian side in Neu-Ulm, was the centre of the movement that became known in German intelligence circles as the Ulm Scene.

Fritz Gelowicz found Islam as a teenager. Investigators say a German friend of Turkish descent named Tolga Durbin introduced Gelowicz to a radical form of Islam.

When searching for potential converts, leaders at the Multi-Kultur-Haus focused on young people, generally between 17 and 28 years old. Gelowicz began to frequent the centre, which preached the strict Wahabi form of Islam practised in Saudi Arabia, far from the norm for the rest of the Muslim community in the area.

For a man said to be a would-be terrorist, Gelowicz was remarkably well known to police and intelligence officials long before his recent arrest. In 2004 police picked up Gelowicz and a friend, Atilla Selek, for setting a book on fire in front of a shop in Ulm. In the car the men were driving, investigators found “propaganda material”, according to court documents, including a CD with information praising jihad, Osama bin Laden, and one of the perpetrators of the September 11, 2001, attacks in the United States.

Soon after, an Iranian-born Kurd with German citizenship named Dana Boluri told investigators that he met Gelowicz and Selek in Saudi Arabia. Gelowicz would later take part in the surveillance of US military barracks in Hanau that refocused investigators’ attention on him in the months before his arrest.

Gelowicz appears to have travelled to Syria and studied Arabic in 2005, according to a certificate from a language school in Damascus included in investigators’ files.

It is unlikely, however, that he finished those studies because intelligence services said he was at a training camp of Jihad Union, a terrorist splinter group in Uzbekistan, in March 2006.

“He was possessed with the desire to launch an attack,” said August Hanning, state secretary at the German Interior Ministry.

NEW YORK TIMES

http://www.theage.com.au/news/world/from-fritz-to-adbullah-conversion-shocks-germans/2007/09/07/1188783495046.html

Jury in Fort Dix Plot to Be Anonymous

By JEFFREY GOLD – Sep 6, 2007

CAMDEN, N.J. (AP) — An anonymous jury will hear the case of six men accused of plotting to attack soldiers at Fort Dix, a federal judge ruled Thursday.

U.S. District Judge Robert B. Kugler agreed with prosecutors’ concerns that jurors could be intimidated because of the nature of the charges and the possibility the media would pursue jurors if their names were released. He rejected defense complaints that such a jury would be biased.

“There is a need to limit the intrusion, potentially, into jurors’ lives,” said Assistant U.S. Attorney Steven R. Stigall.

While the suspects are not accused of being part of a terrorist organization, there are groups in the U.S. that could sympathize with views attributed to the men, Kugler noted.

Rocco Cipparone, the lawyer for Mohamad Ibrahim Shnewer, argued that the suspects have little ability to harm jurors because they are being held in near-isolation at a federal detention center in Philadelphia.

The judge decided, over defense objections, that defense teams would know jurors’ hometowns, but not their names or addresses.

Keeping the names of jurors sealed is an unusual step, but it has been used in a number of federal cases, including some involving allegations of terrorism and organized crime.

The six were arrested in May and charged with planning to raid the New Jersey military installation, which is being used largely to train reservists bound for Iraq.

All six have pleaded not guilty.

Kugler has been pushing for a trial later this year, but defense lawyers said they might not be prepared by then to defend a case that involved hundreds of hours of conversations recorded by two paid government informants. Translations of evidence in Arabic and Albanian won’t be completed for at least another six weeks, said Michael Huff, the lawyer for defendant Dritan Duka.

Five of the men — Shnewer, Serdar Tatar, Duka and Duka’s brothers Shain and Eljvir — face life in prison if convicted of conspiracy to murder military personnel. The sixth, Agron Abdullahu, is charged with weapons offenses punishable by 10 years in prison. His lawyer said he would move to have Abdullahu tried separately.

The suspects, all in their 20s, were born overseas but have spent many years living in Philadelphia’s southern New Jersey suburbs. Authorities said the six scouted out East Coast military installations to find one to attack but settled on Fort Dix largely because Tatar knew his way around from delivering pizzas to the base for his father’s restaurant.

http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5hpU78Fwu6-swpC3MuWomEA9WYcCQ