Man arrested in Germany 'not a terrorist'

Investigators in the German city of Moenchengladbach have ruled out any link to the al-Qaida network of a man they arrested on a tip that he was a member of the terrorist organisation, authorities said today.

Prosecutor Heinz Jurgen Vitz said the man remains in custody on the charge of possession of false papers, but that there is no evidence he has anything to do with Osama bin Laden’s organisation.

The man, arrested late Saturday night in his hotel room, had fake Italian papers identifying him as 40-year-old Mario Bertoldi, Vitz said.

The man is actually a 27-year-old Lebanese national who has been living in the nearby Ruhr area since 1992, said lead investigator Georg Schubert. He is married with a three-year-old child and has a criminal record for robbery and assault and battery. German laws prohibit police from releasing his name.

The tip local police received from the Bundeskriminalamt, the German equivalent of the FBI, was that a man named Bertoldi who was part of the al-Qaida network was to meet with two other terrorists in the hotel, Schubert said.

Prepared for the worst, 100 officers raided the hotel, and searched the man’s car for explosives, Schubert said. The man had a large amount of money and the false papers, but nothing else of interest, Schubert said.

The tip, which was passed from a ‘‘foreign intelligence service’’ to the Bundeskriminalamt, was likely to have come from someone wanting to set the man up for certain arrest, Schubert said.

Several of the al-Qaida-linked September 11 hijackers lived in Hamburg, but only one arrest in connection to the attacks has been made in Germany.

Mounir El Motassadeq, 27, was arrested at his Hamburg apartment on November 28 on charges he ran a bank account used by Mohamed Atta and Marwan Al-Shehhi, who were among the hijackers on September 11.

Hamburg was also home to hijacker Ziad Jarrah and three men believed to have helped plot the attacks. Ramsi Binalshibh of Yemen, Said Bahaji, a German national, and Zakariya Essabar of Morocco are all being sought on international arrest warrants.