TURKISH MAN HELD AFTER LUGGAGE REVEALED TERRORIST MATERIALS

Luggage contained suspect materials

Published Wednesday, October 24, 2001

BY DANIEL RUBIN
Herald World Staff

BERLIN -- German authorities are holding a Turkish man who was yanked off an Iran-bound plane last week after a search of his luggage turned up a chemical weapons suit and a CD-ROM for training holy warriors, prosecutors said Tuesday.

Authorities also recovered materials to build a detonator, combat fatigues and a cloth face mask in the luggage of Harun Aydin, 29. He was arrested on Oct. 17 in Frankfurt after trying to board an Iran Air jetliner for Tehran.

A German official said that ``so far, no connection is discernible'' between Aydin and the investigation of a Hamburg terrorist cell that included three of the suicide hijackers involved in the Sept. 11 attacks.

At a joint news conference in Washington with visiting German Interior Minister Otto Schily, Attorney General John Ashcroft said Hamburg served ``as a central base of operations'' for the hijackers and three other men sought in connection with the terror attacks.

The three fugitives, Said Bahaji, Ramsi Binalshibh and Zakariya Essabar, are sought by Germany on an international arrest warrant for their involvement in planning the attacks.

``Their connections to the hijackers are extensive,'' Ashcroft said. The three hijack suspects -- Mohamed Atta and Marwan Al-Shehhi, who were on the hijacked planes that crashed into the World Trade Center towers, and Ziad Jarrah, suspected of flying the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania -- were roommates in Hamburg where they attended school in the 1990s, Ashcroft said.

Binalshibh and Atta started a Muslim prayer group there while Essabar went to Florida in February when both Atta and al-Shehhi were known to be there. Essabar, Jarrah and al-Shehhi all appeared in Bahaji's wedding video, Ashcroft said.

No such clear connection has been established to Aydin, the Turk whose arrest was revealed Tuesday. But there are plenty of intriguing circumstances surrounding him.

German federal investigators said Aydin, a student, was a key member of a radical Islamic organization founded by Metin Kaplan. Kaplan advocates set up an Islamic republic in Turkey.

U.S. intelligence officials said the CD-ROM in Aydin's luggage is part of a terrorist encyclopedia that was written and published in Pakistan by Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda terrorist organization. They said the manual, drawn partly from U.S. Army manuals and websites, contains instructions on bomb-making, assassination and other topics.

Kaplan supporters met with bin Laden in Afghanistan in 1996 or 1997, according to German prosecutors. Kaplan is serving a four-year prison term for calling for the death of a rival, who later was murdered. He also is suspected of plotting a failed suicide attack two years ago in Turkey on the tomb of the nation's founder, Mustafa Kem al Ataturk.

Aydin is suspected of planning ``serious acts of violence as a member of a terrorist group with an Islamic fundamentalist background,'' the federal prosecutor's office said in a news release. A Frankfurt court ordered him detained on suspicion of membership in a criminal organization and ``giving instructions for serious crimes such as murder and manslaughter.''

His attorney, Michael Murat Sertsoz, said Aydin denied that the items reportedly found in his luggage were his.