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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of $ 5,500 and $ 2,500 sometime last year and withdrawn by Salameh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.