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The Houston Chronicle, March 12, 1993
Copyright 1993 The Houston Chronicle Publishing Company
The Houston Chronicle
March 12, 1993, Friday, 2 STAR Edition
SECTION: A; Pg. 2
LENGTH: 587 words
HEADLINE: Bomb suspects' bank funds had a German source
BYLINE: RALPH BLUMENTHAL; New York Times
DATELINE: NEW YORK
BODY:
NEW YORK -- The funds wired over recent months into the New
Jersey joint bank account of two arrested suspects in the
World
Trade Center bombing have been traced to Germany, law
enforcement
officials said Thursday.
Germany has one of the largest Islamic communities in
Europe
and has been used by an array of Middle East terrorist
organizations as a base of operations, intelligence experts
say.
But investigators said they were not sure where in Germany
the $ 8,000 originated or whether it was provided to
underwrite the
Feb. 26 attack, which killed five people and wounded more
than
1,000.
Two other bank accounts in Jersey City, N.J., have now been
found in the name of the first arrested suspect, Mohammed
Salameh,
a 25-year-old Palestinian, but investigators said they did
not know
of any foreign transfers into those accounts.
The New York Times reported Thursday that federal
investigators had uncovered wire transfers of $ 8,000 from
Europe
into a joint account of Salameh and a Kuwaiti-born chemical
engineer, Nidal Ayyad, at a branch of the National
Westminster Bank
in Jersey City.
Officials said Thursday that the money was wired in amounts
of $ 5,500 and $ 2,500 sometime last year and withdrawn by
Salameh
about a month later.
Ayyad, 25, of Maplewood, N.J., was arrested early Wednesday
on charges of aiding Salameh in the bombing.
The government contended that Salameh repeatedly telephoned
Ayyad a day before the bombing from a storage company where
bomb-making chemicals were kept. It contended that Ayyad
was
present when Salameh leased a Ford van that investigators
believe
carried a 1,000-pound bomb, made of nitric and sulfuric
acids and
urea, into the Trade Center's underground parking garage.
Although the FBI said Wednesday that others were listed on
the account besides Salameh and Ayyad, officials said
Thursday that
was in error. They said that only the two shared the
account, which
was kept at the National Westminster branch near Salameh's
home and
a fundamentalist mosque that also has come under scrutiny
in the
investigation.
The German connection suggested a wide range of
possibilities, experts said.
Germany, which has more than 2 million Muslims in a
population of 80 million, has long been a hotbed of Islamic
and
radical Arab activity.
""Germany and England are definitely the two most active
centers in Europe,'' said Khalid Duran, an associate
scholar at the
Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia and a
German
national of Moroccan origin.
More than 1.5 million of the Muslims are Turks; Cologne has
become known as a center of radical Islamic Turkish groups.
The Islamic Center in Aachen is the largest Islamic center
in
Germany, according to Duran, who added that it has
traditionally
been dominated by Syrian members of the Muslim Brotherhood,
the
largest Islamic opposition group to the Syrian Ba'athist
regime in
Damascus.
There is another Islamic Center in Munich, this one
dominated
by members of the Egyptian branch of the Muslim
Brotherhood, which
has been active in Germany since they sought refuge from
the fierce
repression in the 1950s by Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt.
The Iranians exercise influence through their Islamic
center
in Hamburg. Two former imams of the center have served in
the
Iranian government, Duran added.
Finally, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine
and other radical Palestinian groups, as well as Lebanese
radicals,
are concentrated in Berlin.
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