Anxious Germany waits for other sleepers to awake

The Hamburg connection

German authorities fear their country might be harbouring hundreds of "sleepers": trained Islamic terrorists awaiting orders from their faceless masters.

As Germany's Chief Prosecutor Kay Nehm yesterday named the third hijacker with a Hamburg connection, investigators were trying to unscramble the computer network of one of the universities in the city, believed to have been used as a communications switchboard for Osama bin Laden's organisation.

Much of the preparation for history's worst terrorist attack took place on the redbrick campus of the Technical University in Harburg, an industrial district on the fringes of Hamburg. A soft-spoken graduate student of town planning, Mohamad Atta, now appears to have played a key role in the attempt to raze Manhattan.

Marwan Yusef Mohammed al-Shehhi, the second hijack "pilot", had studied engineering in Hamburg. And Mr Nehm yesterday revealed that the third man, Ziad Samir Jarrah, had been trained in aeronautics at the German taxpayer's expense.

Mohamad Atta had arrived in Germany in 1992 with a United Arab Emirates passport. All he needed to study was evidence of an appropriate secondary education, and a written guarantee from a relative that he would be able to cover living costs. Tuition is free.

Atta was not one of the fastest learners in the faculty of town planning, taking nearly seven years to complete his course. He was, as everybody now attests, totally unremarkable. As Ali Erturan, of the mosque in Harburg, remembers: "He was just another man with black hair and beard. He never aired any radical views here." What is now clear is that Atta, believed to have been at the controls of the first jet that crashed into the World Trade Centre, tried very hard to blend in.

He got noticed for only one thing: his efforts to secure a prayer room at the university. "He just walked into the room and said: 'Guys I have this religion, and it tells me I must pray five times a day'," recalls René Günther, spokesman of the student union. Atta was an easy-going man of mild manners. There was certainly nothing fanatical about him. He got his room with a computer, and Atta's student group, Islam AG, was given its own home page on the university's server.

No one paid much attention to Islam AG's home page – "full of Arabic writing and pictures," university spokesman Rüdiger Bendlin recalls – and never did the German police become curious. But the prayer room is now sealed, its computer removed, and the home page wiped off the face of the net. For police suspect that it and Atta's e-mail address, el-amir@tu-harburg.de, served as the information exchange in a worldwide web of conspiracy stretching from the Middle East to the US.

Apart from furnishing the plotters with their communications links, the Germans unwittingly also provided much of the know-how for the attacks. Atta's chosen field of expertise would have certainly touched on relevant questions, such as the stability of tall buildings.

The three plotters met through Islam AG and at one point shared a flat in the little street where Atta was registered. Germany is aghast. "We wanted to build networks all over the world – scientific and human networks – to promote peaceful co-existence," says Mr Bendlin. "Until this week we thought we were succeeding."