‘98 Arrest: A Piece in Terror Puzzle?

GRUENECK, Germany —  Three years and two weeks ago, the person most clearly connecting Germany and Osama bin Laden came to this rural crossroads near the Munich airport, supposedly to buy a car while en route from the Mediterranean island of Majorca to his home in the United Arab Emirates.

Why the Sudanese man, a business partner in at least two Bin Laden firms, needed to come to Germany to acquire a used Mercedes is one of many questions surrounding Mamdouh Mahmud Salim.

In the three years prior to his Sept. 16, 1998, arrest here on a U.S. warrant, Salim, a suspected top lieutenant in Bin Laden’s Al Qaeda network, made at least five trips to Germany. One visit was to Hamburg, where investigators believe the Sept. 11 suicide attacks on New York and the Pentagon were planned.

Salim now awaits trial in Manhattan in connection with the bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in August 1998. He allegedly stabbed a prison guard in an escape attempt last year.

Authorities here in Bavaria, as well as those in Hamburg, say they have been ordered not to say whether they have established a clear link between Bin Laden and the suspected suicide hijackers who lived and studied in Hamburg before moving to the United States.

But Salim’s visits provide an illuminating piece to the puzzle of how the Hamburg group might have acquired funds from Bin Laden along with his hatred of the West.

A transcript of the interrogations of Salim during his three-month incarceration in Munich confirms at least one trip of unspecified duration to Hamburg at about the time the future suicide hijackers became militants and banded together in a suspected terrorist cell.

The transcript, a copy of which was obtained by The Times, also discloses that Salim made a habit of visiting mosques during his German travels and often struck up conversations with strangers. The Koran, he told investigators, teaches Muslims to approach all within the mosque as “brothers.”

Salim’s first acknowledged German visit was to Hamburg in March 1995, ostensibly to open a bank account with the backing of Hamburg businessman Mamoun Darkazanli, whose name and now-defunct import-export business appear on a U.S. executive order freezing the assets of 27 suspected accomplices of Bin Laden.

Hamburg police say they first interrogated Darkazanli, a Syrian native who has lived in Hamburg for 18 years, a few days after Salim’s arrest here in southern Germany.

It was also shortly after Salim’s arrest that Hamburg intelligence agents were alerted to the presence of an extremist who then lived with chief terrorist suspect Mohamed Atta. They put the man, Said Bahaji, under surveillance. He is now wanted on an international arrest warrant alleging complicity in the terror attacks.

Salim became acquainted with Bin Laden in Pakistan during the 1979-89 war between Muslim fighters and the Soviet army in neighboring Afghanistan. He later worked as an administrator for two Bin Laden-owned firms, Taba and Themar, the former a trade company and the latter an agricultural firm, according to the transcript and a handwritten account by Salim.

Salim said he lost contact with Bin Laden until 1992, when they met again in Sudan and became business partners until 1994. After that, Salim said, he began his own company and set to work trying to create an Arabic-language radio station in Germany with funds including a $1,040 donation from Bin Laden.

All information relevant to the probe into the Sept. 11 attacks is being controlled and kept confidential by federal prosecutor Kay Nehm.

However, Bavaria’s police chief disclosed that Salim arrived by plane from Palma, on the Spanish island of Majorca, in Stuttgart, in neighboring Baden-Wuerttemberg state, on Sept. 13, 1998, and traveled to Ulm, on the Bavarian border. That day, federal authorities received a U.S. request for his arrest and extradition, said Heinz Haumer, head of Bavaria’s State Criminal Office.

The transcript discloses that three men whom Salim had met at the Ulm mosque on previous visits picked him up at the airport and drove him to Ulm, where he spent the night with a Sudanese surgeon he knew from his youth.

The next morning, Salim was picked up by an acquaintance and driven to the Munich area, where he stayed until his arrest two days later at Ali’s Autohandel, a purported used car dealership that has since gone out of business. German news reports have said that the used car dealership was a front for illegal activities.

A day before Salim’s arrest, Bavarian police received information from federal intelligence sources that Salim should be kept under watch, said Haumer, who was then in charge of special forces in Munich.

“We arrested him exclusively at the request of U.S. authorities,” said the police chief, who dispatched one of his SWAT teams to take Salim into custody.

The state prosecutor now responsible for Salim’s case, Stefan Antor, will say only that the information presented to the extradition hearing was judged to constitute no evidence of wrongdoing in Germany, so the U.S. extradition request was satisfied.

Before his extradition, Salim was interrogated on at least six days prior to his initial appearance before the court. All sessions except for the first two were conducted through an Arabic interpreter because Salim spoke no German.

Records from the extradition hearing detail the contents of Salim’s suitcases, including at least a dozen compact discs, computer software and a mobile phone that was incompatible with the service providers in all of the areas he traveled in Europe. Salim arrived in Majorca on a flight from Dubai, United Arab Emirates, via Istanbul, Turkey. He was to have left for Dubai via Istanbul the day of his arrest.

Salim was asked to identify numbers programmed into his mobile phone, and he attributed most to business contacts, the transcript shows. Darkazanli’s number was the only one confirmed in Germany, but the questioning didn’t cover what information might have been obtained from the CDs or computer records.

Salim was also found to have two Sudanese passports in his possession, one listing his family name as Ahmed--one of several aliases disclosed during questioning.

While the only references to Hamburg in the transcript relate to his March 1995 visit to open the account with Darkazanli, the record also confirmed other trips to Germany--in July 1995, January 1997 and September-October 1997.

The Hamburg trip put Salim in the city about the time that friends of Atta say he began to change from a thoughtful if strict Muslim to a brooding and bearded fundamentalist deeply disturbed by events in his Egyptian homeland.

During questioning that ran as long as five hours per session, Salim failed to explain why he carried so much information about business and personal contacts with him on what was originally to have been a three-day German visit.

His four-day stay in Palma was allegedly to arrange a printing business, and his visit here was explained as an effort to get a better deal on a used Mercedes than he could have at home in Dubai.

Asked why he didn’t fly to Munich if he wanted to buy the car there, or arrange the purchase closer to Stuttgart, where he landed, Salim told investigators: “because at the time I was unaware that Mercedes had a dealership in Stuttgart.” That city is the headquarters and production center for DaimlerChrysler, which makes Mercedes.

Salim explained his travels in southern Germany on the days before his arrest in terms of two objectives: to buy the car arranged for through a contact identified as Walid Awaad-Borrmann, and to bring a Koran to his surgeon friend in Ulm. Salim said he had noted during an earlier visit to the Ulm mosque that the children of Muslim immigrants were praying in German instead of Arabic.

The transcript also discloses that Salim had an additional bank account in Ulm, where he traveled at least twice prior to his arrest.

Appended to the transcript is a note to the FBI that Salim hand-wrote in broken English. In it, he professes “annocence” in the embassy bombings but also expresses understanding of the need to pursue those responsible for the attacks.

“I am totally share you and appreciatate you serious to look for the guilty, to look for security in your country. This is common scense,” reads the scrawled addendum. But he insists he had nothing to do with terrorism and advised U.S. authorities to stop pursuing Bin Laden associates “because you cannot reach the actual guilty people.”

In his testimony before the court in which he fought extradition, Salim accused U.S. authorities of “trying to use against me my stay in Pakistan during the Afghanistan war from 1986 to 1992.”