German terror plot ‘on 9/11 scale’

FOUR men accused of a foiled German terror plot were fuelled by hatred and aimed to cause destruction on the scale of September 11, a court heard yesterday.

“The defendants were driven by the will to destroy the enemies of Islam — particularly US citizens — in Germany and to reach the scale of the September 11 attacks,” prosecutor Volker Brinkmann said as he opened the trial at Duesseldorf state court.

The four, two Germans and two Turks, were moved by “profound hatred of the USA as the greatest enemy of Islam”, said another prosecutor, Ralf Setton. He said they aimed to kill “as many people as possible”.

The group planned car bomb attacks on pubs, discos and airports, and considered targets in cities including Frankfurt, Dortmund, Duesseldorf, Cologne, Stuttgart, Munich and Ramstein — where the US military has a large air base.

They maintain the attacks were to be carried out before an October 2007 vote by the German parliament on extending German troops’ stay in Afghanistan.

Three of the men, alleged ringleader Fritz Gelowicz, 29; Daniel Schneider, 23; and Adem Yilmaz, 30, were arrested in central Germany on September 4, 2007. Turkey picked up the fourth, 24-year-old Attila Selek, in Turkey in November 2007 and extradited him to Germany. The four are accused of being members of the radical Islamic Jihad Union and the trial is expected to last at least until the end of August.