Terrorism Close Calls (2018) s01e10 Episode Script
German Jihad & The EURO Plot
Germany is no longer immune to terrorist attacks.
Germany is now a target itself.
2005, 2006 was a turning point at which security authorities became increasingly aware that Germany itself can be the focus of terrorist efforts.
The interrogation of an Afghan-German jihadist reveals a new al-Qaeda terrorist strategy sanctioned by Osama bin Laden.
If the Europlot had been successful, given the number of individuals involved, given also the expertise, that could have easily have caused hundreds of fatalities.
Al-Qaeda wants to perpetrate attacks throughout Europe.
These attacks were supposed to prove to Europe that al-Qaeda is present and can strike.
German jihadists are recruited through a sophisticated online propaganda campaign by a group called the German Taliban.
These people were radicalized in Germany, "home-grown" terrorists.
Probably dozens of people were under constant surveillance.
In order to stop this new threat, Germany leans on U.
S.
intelligence for support while implementing new security measures of their own.
We have outsourced parts of our counter-terrorism to the United States.
I am not sure whether that will be the case in the future, and so we have to do our homework in this regard.
True stories of the world's deadliest terror plots with exclusive access to leading counter-terrorism experts and the elite agents who stopped the attacks.
- Homegrown terrorists.
- Jihadi propaganda.
Neo-Nazis.
This cuts across ideological lines, and this cuts across nationalism lines.
The depravity of the enemy we face knows no bounds, and so does our determination to keep them from hurting people.
People's lives depend on their success.
On this episode of Terrorism Close Calls, the interrogation of a suspected German jihadist in Afghanistan reveals a new terror strategy by al-Qaeda to recruit new members and conduct a string of small-scale deadly attacks throughout Europe.
Acts of terrorism are said to be on the rise in Germany, but it's not a new phenomenon.
As a strategy, it was routinely used against elected officials during the Weimar Republic, and would later lead to the rise of the Nazis.
Daniel Heinke is chief of detectives and director at the State Bureau of Investigation in Bremen, Germany.
Germany witnessed a large number of terrorist attacks by left-wing extremists, in particular by the so-called Red Army Faction, the RAF.
There were also terrorist attacks due to right-wing extremism, such as the attack on the Munich Oktoberfest.
In recent years, however, the focus has shifted towards Islamist terrorism.
2005, 2006 was a turning point at which security authorities became increasingly aware that Germany itself can be the focus of terrorist efforts.
In 2005, German authorities began recording the number of potential Islamic militants inside the country.
There are 105 individuals that pose a national security threat.
That number grows rapidly.
We now count more than 760 people as so-called "threats" in the area of Islamist extremism.
This is an incredible burden for the German security authorities.
In addition to these 760 people we consider to be active threats, there are several hundred more people who can be considered supporters, logisticians, or other participants.
People that could aid attacks.
So we can assume that there are over a thousand people with extremist views who are potentially violent.
Georg Heil is one of Germany's leading investigative journalists.
The fact that the civil war in Syria is much closer to our doorstep now than the war zones in Afghanistan and Pakistan has led many Germans to travel to these war zones, in order to gain combat experience, before returning.
Many of these German jihadists are linked to the Islamic Jihad Union an al-Qaeda affiliate based in Mir Ali in the North Waziristan tribal region of Pakistan.
In the early 2000s, the Islamic Jihad Union gained influence in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and especially in Waziristan.
It also became very attractive to German fighters.
The reason is, in retrospect, very difficult to explain.
In fact, about ten years ago, it was, unlike today, relatively easy to get into these crisis regions.
So, people arrived from Germany, in particular via Pakistan, joined such groups, received training, and were able to return.
These are methods that are nearly impossible today, but they were still possible at the time.
The main attraction for German fighters was probably that these were the only openly accessible armed groups.
It was not easy to join the Taliban in Afghanistan, so these Waziristan-based groups were the natural focal point for German jihadists.
German authorities arrest four IJU operatives including two German Muslim converts and disrupt the group's plans to attack targets inside Germany.
The group is called the Sauerland Cell.
The German security authorities were astounded that these people were essentially domestically radicalized, so-called "home-grown" terrorists.
The Sauerland Cell was the second largest investigation of its kind, the first pertaining to the attacks of September 11, 2001.
Several of the attackers on 9/11 had been radicalized in Hamburg.
They were students at a Hamburg university, they met there, they connected with each other.
Many had also attended the same mosque in Hamburg.
Nine years later, German authorities learn of another cell forming under their watch with links back to Hamburg, only this time they are planning attacks inside Germany itself.
Guido Steinberg is one of Germany's leading authorities on terrorism, and is often called as an objective expert witness during terror trials.
Steinberg also works for the German Institute for International and Security Affairs and is the best-selling author of the book German Jihad.
The first information about this string of plots emerged when single jihadists returned from the Pakistani tribal areas in 2010.
And the most important person was a guy called Ahmed Siddiqui, from Hamburg, an Afghan-German.
Ahmed Siddiqui, a 36-year-old German citizen from Hamburg, is trying to get a new passport from the German embassy in the Afghan capital of Kabul.
He's detained and transferred to the American airbase at Bagram for questioning.
U.
S.
authorities suspect that Ahmed Siddiqui may be an al-Qaeda jihadist who's received training in Pakistan.
During his initial interrogation, Siddiqui insists that he simply moved to Afghanistan with his family to experience life in his native country.
Over the next month, German and U.
S.
intelligence learn that Siddiqui is a member of the notorious Taiba mosque in Hamburg.
Formerly known as Al-Quds, it's the same mosque attended by the 9/11 attackers.
Peter Neumann is a professor of security studies at King's College in London.
There is a reluctance, perhaps, to move too harshly against religions.
And I think that resulted in a situation where German authorities were too careful, and almost hesitant to close down mosques.
Like the mosque in Hamburg, the Al-Quds mosque where some of the 9/11 attackers came from, they were hesitant to close it down for fear of being seen to be interfering with the free exercise of religion.
The question now, "Is Siddiqui part of a larger terror cell or terror plot?" Information detailed by Siddiqui through his interrogation is shared to German authorities back home, who quickly open an investigation into Siddiqui and other possible German co-conspirators.
Ahmed S.
was born in 1974 in Afghanistan to a relatively wealthy Afghan family.
The father was a pilot.
In 1990, in the wake of the civil war in Afghanistan, the family moved to Germany.
He then grew up in Hamburg and had, as far as is known, never gained a foothold there.
The family suffered from financial problems.
Sometime in the late 1990s, he came into contact with the Al-Quds mosque, as it was then called, later the Taiba mosque, in Hamburg.
This is when Ahmed S.
ultimately radicalized.
It remained, basically, a place where radical, if not extreme, people were meeting.
So that's what happened to Siddiqui, too.
He went to that mosque.
He basically got to know the other perpetrators, and what often happened in these places is that not only did people get to know each other, they also became sort of friends.
Ahmed Siddiqui admits that he had met a man at the Taiba mosque named Naamen Meziche, whom he claims persuaded him, along with a number of other young men, to join in jihad.
He described in detail how he was basically being told to watch videos, almost every night, which talked about the suffering of Muslims across the world.
And watching these videos, he got the impression or he started buying into the narrative of the extremists, which is that, basically, the West is at war with Muslims and Islam, and if being a Muslim means anything to him, he needs to fight back, and fight against the West.
And that, basically, that very simple narrative, is what bound these people together ideologically.
That's what basically justified, in their own minds, the idea of going back to the countries in which they had grown up and attacking people, ordinary people in these countries, because, eventually, they regarded the entire society that they lived in as enemy.
Siddiqui and the others began to radicalize and pursue a more active jihadist role.
They developed very tightly-knit, personal relationships, and so, at the end, basically, they went over, they decided to go over to Pakistan, with the intention of going to Afghanistan in two or three trenches.
But they were, at that point, already very tightly-knit.
They were a peer group.
They were a cell.
Siddiqui reveals that he and ten others, including his younger brother, had left Hamburg and traveled to the Afghan-Pakistan border area to attend militant training camps.
The group use several routes to get to Pakistan, some through Iran, and some traveling by air via the Persian Gulf.
German authorities name the group from the Taiba mosque the Tour Group.
There were nine men and two women, all of whom frequented the Taiba mosque, who, probably in 2008, had come up with the idea to travel to the combat zones in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
This group of 11 people split up, Ahmed S.
being the vanguard, one of the first to leave.
It was a very colorful mix of people from different ethnic backgrounds, from Kazakhstan, for example, from Arab countries, all of whom had attended this mosque and had one thing in common: they had never gained a foothold in Germany.
There was a former junkie, there were people who were unemployed.
This departure into the war zones in Afghanistan and Pakistan was certainly some kind of an escape from their failed lives in Germany.
They said, you can come here and you can have a wonderful life, you can come here with your wife and your children, and there are brothers who you can speak your language to, there is a community of German people here, and you can live in accordance with your values.
You no longer have to be in the decadent West where you are being, basically you're feeling oppressed every day.
Ahmed S.
then left for Pakistan in March 2009, he traveled via Doha in Qatar, and then later landed in the tribal areas of Waziristan and spent some time there, initially joining the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, a terrorist group operating there.
That did not work out very well for him.
He sustained a knee injury relatively quickly, and he suffered from malaria.
As opposed to later departures, for example to Syria, the journey alone was very difficult.
Upon arrival in Afghanistan and Pakistan, foreign fighters could not count on having running water or electricity at their disposal.
And of course, they then found out that, basically, none of the things that were being said in the videos were true.
That life really was, actually, quite miserable, and that there were no facilities for people, that they couldn't leave their houses, and this was not a great place to bring up children, basically, in a war zone.
If you look at some of the perpetrators, some of the attackers, they were quite unhealthy.
It's at this time that Siddiqui's father travels to Waziristan, pleading for his sons to leave the terror group and return to Germany with him.
With the younger brother, Suleiman, this clearly worked.
Ahmed S.
remained there by himself.
It was said that the father returned to Germany broken-hearted and without his eldest son.
Once Siddiqui's health recovers, he decides to join al-Qaeda.
Apparently, he provided on-site services for al-Qaeda and his fellow fighters, including IT services, cleaning computers of viruses, restoring laptops, working on software, things where he could make himself useful.
Due to his physical size and knee injury, he was not particularly valuable as a fighter, but he found his role and made his contribution.
Later, he joined al-Qaeda and came into contact with the number-three al-Qaeda sheikh, Younis al-Mauritani, who recruited him.
Al-Mauritani is wanted by U.
S.
authorities.
Siddiqui has to go through elaborate security procedures before being allowed to meet the sheikh.
He says that it takes several weeks before they meet, but once they do, al-Mauritani reveals a new terror plot.
As far as it is known, Sheikh al-Mauritani shared his secret plans with Ahmed S.
He said he had developed ideas for attacks in Europe that had been sanctioned by bin Laden himself.
These attacks were supposed to prove to Europe that al-Qaeda is present and can strike.
So you can assume that this plot had been in the making for at least half a year because getting approval from bin Laden at that point, with the level of attention that had been on him was something very complicated and complex that would have taken a number of months.
But certainly it indicates that al-Qaeda, even at that late stage, 2010, was still looking for an opportunity to attack Western targets, and to, effectively, repeat what they did on 9/11.
Sheikh Younis al-Mauritani wants to carry out coordinated attacks in various countries in Europe, including the U.
K.
, France, Italy, and Germany, similar to the attacks that took place in Mumbai, India on November 26, 2010.
Ten members of Lashkar, a terror group based in Pakistan, carry out a series of 12 coordinated attacks over four days across the city.
The attacks kill 164 people and injure 308.
Al-Qaeda want to replicate these attacks in Europe.
Terror groups are planning to attack inside Germany and other cities in Europe.
In response, the U.
S.
State Department issues a Europe-wide security advisory for Americans traveling overseas, initiating multiple European countries to raise the terror alert to a high threat status.
It was clear that they planned attacks with a high symbolic significance, and that their plan would include several European countries, notably the United Kingdom and France.
In order to prevent the attacks, German and British intelligence, with the help of the United States National Security Agency, work together to locate members of the German cell in the tribal areas of North Waziristan before they can return home to carry out attacks.
President Obama's administration orders missile strikes by unmanned CIA drones against terrorist targets.
They kill several German militants in North Waziristan.
There was a huge pressure on these groups, simply because so many leaders and so many fighters had been killed in the American drone war that was started, by the latest, in 2008.
It was started, still, by the Bush administration, but then the number of attacks rose substantially in the first two years of the Obama administration.
All of these jihadists report that they were frightened, extremely frightened, by the existence of drones in the Pakistani skies, at that time.
Of the more than 200 people who traveled to this region from Germany, many either quickly made their way back, or were killed during combat with Pakistani security agencies, or by American air strikes.
Along with drone strikes in Waziristan, German authorities are also on high alert for threats at home.
The police in Germany have various special units to deal with terrorist threats.
Each state maintains special task forces, or SEKs, which are trained for such attacks.
Additionally, there is the elite unit GSG9, the Grenzschutzgruppe 9, which functions as an elite unit of the Federal Police, and is highly specialized in seizing terrorist offenders.
Just two weeks after the interrogation of Siddiqui, the United States National Security Agency intercept an email between a man named el-Kebir in the city of Düsseldorf and the head of al-Qaeda in Waziristan, Atiyatallah Abu Abd al-Rahman.
Abdeladim el-K.
apparently said to his contact people in Waziristan: "We are still training, but we will keep our promise, and will soon start with the slaughtering of the dogs.
" That was a very clear clue for the terror plot, the imminent attack.
Concerned that the attack may be imminent, German authorities work to gain more intelligence on el-Kebir.
Kebir was in Pakistan for about two months.
He was sent back in May 2010, after having arrived in the area, sometime in spring.
It is obvious that he was in North Waziristan, because he had met important planners of al-Qaeda, who, at that time, were based over there.
In Waziristan, el-Kebir trains with al-Qaeda, and is able to meet with some of its leaders, especially Libyan Abd al-Rahman, head of al-Qaeda in Waziristan, as well as Younis al-Mauritani.
El-Kebir then returns to Düsseldorf in Germany with orders to recruit other members to a terror cell in order to commit a string of bomb attacks in Germany, and create as much chaos and violence as possible.
That's what made bin Laden famous.
He became famous because of 9/11, because he had managed to hurt the most powerful country in the world, and it is that sort of scenario, a mass attack on Western targets within the West, preferably being carried out by people who had been part of these societies.
That's what they were looking for, that's what they were keen on, and that's, to some extent, what they were seeking to replicate.
El-Kebir finds willing jihadists to join this new terror campaign, who help fund the purchase of weapons and explosives.
Jamil S.
provided the apartment on WitzelstraÃe in Düsseldorf, where the bomb was to be built.
Jamil S.
was considered a housing provider, and also a bomb maker.
The then 19-year-old Amid C.
, a German-Iranian student who had been radicalized, was particularly responsible for the encrypted communication between the individual group members.
There was one more person, from Bochum: Halil S.
, who is considered a supporter of this group, was particularly responsible for logistics, but also for fundraising, which he achieved through criminal means at times, for example, through fraudulent transactions on eBay, in order to finance these attacks.
The group of three members, known as the Düsseldorf Cell, begin to purchase chemicals for the bombs.
New intelligence revealed through surveillance raises the stakes again.
German authorities, after receiving the information from the USA, began monitoring the apartment intensively, and also had it bugged.
In intercepted conversations, a bus stop was mentioned where something was supposed to happen.
How determined Abdeladim el-K.
was to commit attacks in Europe, and in Germany, can be recognized in his communications with Pakistan, in which he promises that he would soon start "slaughtering the dogs.
" Apparently, this referred to attacks.
With this new information, German authorities decide it's time to make the arrests.
Three men were arrested in the apartment where they were going to build the bomb, on WitzelstraÃe in Düsseldorf.
The German police had to assume that there was a high-risk factor, which is why Germany's Federal Police elite unit, task force GSG9, was ordered to conduct the arrest of these people.
When GSG9 arrest ringleader Abdeladim el-Kebir, he makes a last-ditch effort, grabs a knife, and tries to attack one of the policemen, but is quickly taken down.
Inside the apartment, of course, bomb-making utensils were found, including the chemical acetone, and the grill lighters that did not contain the chemical hexamine that the bomb makers had expected to find.
However, that also counted as an attempt to make a bomb, an explosive device.
And so, the evidence of what had been found in the apartment was quite conclusive.
With the bomb, they wanted to carry out a spectacular attack in Germany.
They planned on using a cluster bomb.
More evidence is uncovered that helps confirm el-Kebir's guilt: it's a letter found in Osama bin Laden's compound after he is killed by the U.
S.
Navy Seal in Abbottabad, Pakistan.
And on the basis of this letter, court could prove that Abdeladim el-Kebir had, indeed, been in Pakistan, and had, indeed, sworn loyalty to Osama bin Laden.
The problem for the court, now, was to establish whether this letter that was given to the German authorities by the FBI was authentic.
Nobody expected the FBI to send the officials back, but what happened is they appeared, indeed, in court in Düsseldorf in 2012.
It was the very person who had received the Navy SEALs on the tarmac, and he traveled with the materials to the United States.
So they had all the FBI officials who had come into contact with this letter, and, thereby, established a chain of evidence from Abbottabad to the United States to Germany, thereby, establishing that the letter was authentic, and that it originated from the archives of Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad.
And this was, in the end, the evidence that was needed in order to convict Abdeladim el-Kebir and his colleagues.
The letter, authenticated by FBI officials, establishes a chain of evidence from Abbottabad to the United States to Germany that helped convict el-Kebir, along with the other three members of the Düsseldorf Cell.
And it was one of the most interesting trials in my trial history, simply because it showed the inner workings of American counter-terrorism in a very important and exciting episode.
And it showed to what extent a German-American, transatlantic partnership works, if it has too.
It must have been a shock to the American FBI officials to learn that somebody like Kebir would land in jail for only nine years when he would have probably spent more time in jail in the United States, if he had been caught by the Americans.
Several months later, a fourth member of the cell is discovered through email exchanges.
A German-Turk named Halil Simsek made contact with al-Qaeda, telling them he wished to continue with el-Kebir's plans to conduct a bomb attack in Germany.
He asks al-Qaeda for advice.
Even after the arrests of the key members of the Düsseldorf Cell, the danger isn't averted.
The Germans fear that at least one other group affiliated with the Europlot are still active.
Two weeks later, police in Vienna and Germany receive intelligence regarding two individuals who they believe had trained overseas and recently returned to Europe to recruit members to an al-Qaeda affiliated cell.
Both Lodin and Ocak are on Germany's watchlist because they had appeared in propaganda videos for the German Taliban.
The German Taliban Mujahideen they only existed between September 2009 and April 2010, but they started a huge propaganda offensive against the German state.
For the first time, Germany had to cope with several videos, messages, that were sent in German language, threatening Germany with attacks.
Of course, it was also important for recruiting people, that young, potentially-radicalized Muslims in Germany could see that their fellow believers actually went there, that they spoke to them in German, had a high propaganda value, which certainly played an important role in the recruitment of people.
What these videos communicated was that there was a place for people to go, um, and that this was a place where people could go, at some point they said, with their entire families.
So these videos were also significant because they turned some of the people that had gone there into semi-celebrities, in the sense that, of course, these videos were being reported about in the media, and there was a lot of coverage, and some of the people that starred in these videos became well known figures.
When the German Taliban disbanded, several key members, including Lodin and Ocak, joined al-Qaeda.
Authorities discover the pair had been selected by al-Mauritani and al-Qaeda to travel to Europe and recruit new members.
Sheikh Mauritani was looking to recruit people who came from Europe, who knew their way around, who were ready to attack in Europe and to establish cells there.
When he met Maqsood L.
and Yusuf O.
, he is quoted to have said that they were the ideal candidates.
And the plan was to recruit friends, former friends, but both were arrested.
The whole story did not seem so spectacular.
What was spectacular was what was found on thumb drives that they carried on their bodies.
The discovery of the USB sticks was a stroke of luck for the German security authorities.
They contained documents, which first had to be laboriously decrypted.
At first glance, they appeared to contain pornography.
Buried inside the USB drive is a pornographic video called Kick Ass, and a file marked Sexy Tanja.
But behind the pornography was hidden documents.
They had brought with them internal al-Qaeda papers, strategy papers about future work in Europe.
And that was the first major insight, besides the Osama bin Laden Abbottabad papers, into internal discussions.
And, as it seems, there had been a long discussion in leadership circles in Pakistan about how the organization should react to all its problems in 2008, 2009, to 2010.
So many of its leaders, so many of its personnel had been killed already in 2010.
The organization had not been able to perpetrate a larger attack since the London bombings in 2005.
And the document "Future Work" contained some of the most influential thoughts in al-Qaeda strategic discussions in all these years.
The "Future Works" document on the thumb drive describes kidnapping known figures, putting them in orange jumpsuits and killing them on video.
It also contains instructions on how to send the videos back to al-Qaeda.
Yusuf O.
and Maqsood L.
were both brought to trial in Berlin.
They were convicted of membership in a terrorist organization.
The court determined that both pose an imminent threat, which led to prison sentences of nine years for Yusuf O.
and six years for Maqsood L.
Information on the thumb drive along with documents found at Osama bin Laden's hideout confirm that the Europlot is primarily a German phenomenon, and an outcome of targeted recruitment campaigns.
And in 2010, Germans must have constituted the biggest contingent of foreign fighters, of Western fighters, in the Pakistani tribal areas, at least if you don't count Turks as European foreign fighters.
And so, it was only logical that when recruits were sent back by al-Qaeda to perpetrate attacks in Europe, there would be a strong German element to it.
And we know about the two groups who then tried to build structures in Berlin, Vienna, and in Düsseldorf, and perpetrate attacks.
And we know about certain individuals who left Pakistan in 2010 and who might have been a part of this Europlot.
The plot disclosed by Ahmed Siddiqui leads to the discovery of the terror cells in Düsseldorf, Berlin, and Vienna, but the flow of online propaganda targeting Western jihadists may have instigated attacks by lone operatives as well.
Many believe the terror attacks perpetrated in France in 2012 are tied to al-Qaeda's Europlot.
The attacks take place over eight days from March 11 through March 19, and start with a man who shoots and kills a French army paratrooper in the city of Toulouse.
It's followed by a second attack four days later that kills two uniformed French soldiers and seriously injures another in the city of Montauban.
The third attack targets children at the Ozar Hatorah Jewish Day School in Toulouse.
Four people, including a teacher and three children, are killed, four others are wounded.
Police identify the shooter as Mohammed Merah, a 23-year-old French petty criminal of Algerian descent who was born and raised in Toulouse.
He is killed after a 30-hour siege.
One of the recent theories is a form of leaderless jihadism.
There is no central leadership, and people simply operate on their own.
There's a lot of truth in that, but it's also not the whole story.
The Islamic State, in its terrorist form, sees itself as a kind of franchise company.
Meaning, that it is possible to declare one's loyalty to the Islamic State, and then, following its demands, to commit attacks without any specific agreements.
In this respect, a leaderless jihad is indeed born.
And this is a pattern, um, that al-Qaeda has engaged in for many, many years, in the sense that the top people tell some of their subordinates to attack, but they leave it to them to figure out what targets are best.
And this seems to have been the case here too.
Many assume Mohammed Merah is a lone wolf, but new evidence reveals that he had visited Pakistan's tribal areas in early 2010.
Many see this association and time period as being a clear link to the Europlot.
I am convinced that Mohammad Merah was a part of the Europlot, other observers are not.
His would be the only successful attack.
The others had been stopped or arrested.
So, if the Europlot had been successful, given the number of individuals involved, given, also, the expertise that they had been able to acquire, building proper explosive devices multiple explosions in numerous cities across the continent, that could easily have caused hundreds of fatalities.
There might have been a real panic in European societies because, let's not forget, terrorism is not just about inflicting physical pain, it's also about creating a psychological effect on societies.
So you might have seen a real polarization within European societies.
Extremists not only on the jihadist side, but also on the far-right side becoming stronger, perhaps spaces in the mainstream becoming narrow, revenge attacks against mosques and, basically, a poisoning of European societies that, thankfully, has not happened yet.
In spite of these police and intelligence successes it also illustrates Germany's shortcomings.
Ocak and Lodin were already monitored when they arrived.
There is no conclusive information about how they were caught, but my suspicion is, that, again, American security authorities informed their European colleagues that these people were coming back.
It seems, after all, that the NSA and the CIA had quite privileged insights into al-Qaeda communications at that time, because it is quite astounding that all the individuals who were sent back to Germany at that time, and there might have been one or two others, were caught.
And if you consider that the German intelligence services are relatively weak, they've got no assets in Turkey or in Iran, they really don't know about travel movements from Pakistan via Iran, Turkey, and the Balkans to Germany, I am positive, I am convinced, that the first information, again, came from Washington.
Germany is freeloading, to some extent, because almost all of the plots that have been thwarted and discovered in Germany were thwarted and discovered because of signals intelligence received from the NSA, from the Americans.
And, unfortunately, that is a problem of the German system.
In the German system, the intelligence services are weak and the police is strong.
And the police normally tend to arrest people as early as possible, in order to be on the safe side.
While intelligence services, intelligence officials, are a lot more curious, and they are not as risk averse as the police.
But because the police are so influential, most of the German plots are thwarted before it is really well-known what the target is.
One particular challenge we face is collecting the information that the military or foreign intelligence services generate in crisis areas, like currently in Syria, and to utilize it effectively for law enforcement agencies, both overseas and domestically.
We all must find a way of generating the transmission of information, first, more quickly and second, more easily.
The Europlot was the second most significant plot in Germany after the Sauerland plot.
It certainly captured people's imagination, it shocked society, it was headline news for a couple of days, even for a week.
But like all thwarted plots, I think the effects were rather short term.
We didn't see major change in Germany after it.
And to some extent, to this day, we still have a lot of the problems in Germany with a lack of communication between the different states, lots of different agencies doing the same thing with difficulty of doing proper surveillance that is a lot easier in a lot of other European countries.
So none of the issues have really been resolved.
Al-Qaeda's new strategy of smaller attacks is also a challenge for security.
Germany has comparatively strict gun laws, which make it very difficult for suspected terrorists to obtain firearms.
The possession of knives is almost impossible to regulate, and licensing wouldn't do much either.
Cars, used as ramming weapons, are also very difficult to control.
Thus, it is up to the security authorities, together with our other administrative partners, to minimize these attacks as much as possible.
In the personal sphere, by trying to recognize potential attackers earlier in order to be able to intervene as early as possible.
Another challenge to authorities is monitoring and reducing online propaganda initiated by al-Qaeda and other terrorist organizations.
For example, propaganda distribution via social media is something that the Islamic State has mastered.
For the first time in history, it is now possible to deliver large amounts of ideological propaganda in a very short time to many people.
Therefore, statistically, the likelihood that some people will actually fall victim to this propaganda and join these groups is far higher than in the past.
My impression is that ideology is more important than every other factor.
That's mainly because I do not see any socio-economic profile.
So terrorism is not a middle-class phenomenon among German jihadists, but it's also not a lower-class, a working-class, phenomenon, or of those who don't have any jobs at all.
And that leaves ideology.
The only way to get acquainted with jihadist ideology in 2001 is to read books written by Arab preachers, or to go to Salafist preachers in Germany who all speak Arabic.
Though Ahmed S.
was born in Afghanistan, and later trained in weapons and explosives there, he spent most of his life in Germany.
And above all, and that is the important point, he was radicalized here in Hamburg.
He is, like the others from the Düsseldorf Cell, a home-grown terrorist, and not a person who was sent from the outside.
Although he had spent time in Afghanistan, his homeland was Germany, and the decisive question is, where did the radicalization take place? It is quite clear that this radicalization process occurred in Germany.
The importance of so-called radicalization nodes, or radicalization hubs, particularly places where people can exchange views and share radical content without being noticed.
One of those radicalization hubs is believed to be the notorious Al-Quds mosque, renamed Taiba after 9/11.
It's here that so many of the German jihadists claim to have been radicalized.
As a result of Siddiqui's arrest and confession, authorities in Hamburg decide to shut down the mosque.
There are a multitude of challenges which German society must tackle if it wants to be prepared for the future in the face of terror.
On the one hand, it is about reducing the reservoir of people who are willing to commit themselves to terror.
It's about making people offers.
It is important that many of the immigrants have prospects so that they are not prone to terror.
This is a task for society as a whole, where it is also about discrimination and racism.
You can see that the Salafists are very successful in recruiting people on the Internet.
A well-known German-Israeli psychologist once said, "They are the better social workers.
" That means, we also need social workers on the Internet who try to prevent such people from falling into the hands of the Salafists.
It is necessary to assemble all parties, not only the security authorities, but also civic actors, and other resources, such as schools, kindergartens, social and youth welfare offices, behind a unified strategy in order to prevent more people from joining this extremist ideology.
Many still credit the support of the United States intelligence agencies as being a key factor in stopping plots against Germany.
I think in 2010, 2011, we were, first, extremely lucky.
Um, and we were extremely lucky that we had such a strong ally.
In fact, we have outsourced parts of our counter-terrorism to the United States.
That is good, as long as the United States is a reliable partner.
I am not sure whether that will be the case in the future, and so we have to do our homework in this regard, um regardless of how the transatlantic relationship works.
Germany is now a target itself.
2005, 2006 was a turning point at which security authorities became increasingly aware that Germany itself can be the focus of terrorist efforts.
The interrogation of an Afghan-German jihadist reveals a new al-Qaeda terrorist strategy sanctioned by Osama bin Laden.
If the Europlot had been successful, given the number of individuals involved, given also the expertise, that could have easily have caused hundreds of fatalities.
Al-Qaeda wants to perpetrate attacks throughout Europe.
These attacks were supposed to prove to Europe that al-Qaeda is present and can strike.
German jihadists are recruited through a sophisticated online propaganda campaign by a group called the German Taliban.
These people were radicalized in Germany, "home-grown" terrorists.
Probably dozens of people were under constant surveillance.
In order to stop this new threat, Germany leans on U.
S.
intelligence for support while implementing new security measures of their own.
We have outsourced parts of our counter-terrorism to the United States.
I am not sure whether that will be the case in the future, and so we have to do our homework in this regard.
True stories of the world's deadliest terror plots with exclusive access to leading counter-terrorism experts and the elite agents who stopped the attacks.
- Homegrown terrorists.
- Jihadi propaganda.
Neo-Nazis.
This cuts across ideological lines, and this cuts across nationalism lines.
The depravity of the enemy we face knows no bounds, and so does our determination to keep them from hurting people.
People's lives depend on their success.
On this episode of Terrorism Close Calls, the interrogation of a suspected German jihadist in Afghanistan reveals a new terror strategy by al-Qaeda to recruit new members and conduct a string of small-scale deadly attacks throughout Europe.
Acts of terrorism are said to be on the rise in Germany, but it's not a new phenomenon.
As a strategy, it was routinely used against elected officials during the Weimar Republic, and would later lead to the rise of the Nazis.
Daniel Heinke is chief of detectives and director at the State Bureau of Investigation in Bremen, Germany.
Germany witnessed a large number of terrorist attacks by left-wing extremists, in particular by the so-called Red Army Faction, the RAF.
There were also terrorist attacks due to right-wing extremism, such as the attack on the Munich Oktoberfest.
In recent years, however, the focus has shifted towards Islamist terrorism.
2005, 2006 was a turning point at which security authorities became increasingly aware that Germany itself can be the focus of terrorist efforts.
In 2005, German authorities began recording the number of potential Islamic militants inside the country.
There are 105 individuals that pose a national security threat.
That number grows rapidly.
We now count more than 760 people as so-called "threats" in the area of Islamist extremism.
This is an incredible burden for the German security authorities.
In addition to these 760 people we consider to be active threats, there are several hundred more people who can be considered supporters, logisticians, or other participants.
People that could aid attacks.
So we can assume that there are over a thousand people with extremist views who are potentially violent.
Georg Heil is one of Germany's leading investigative journalists.
The fact that the civil war in Syria is much closer to our doorstep now than the war zones in Afghanistan and Pakistan has led many Germans to travel to these war zones, in order to gain combat experience, before returning.
Many of these German jihadists are linked to the Islamic Jihad Union an al-Qaeda affiliate based in Mir Ali in the North Waziristan tribal region of Pakistan.
In the early 2000s, the Islamic Jihad Union gained influence in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and especially in Waziristan.
It also became very attractive to German fighters.
The reason is, in retrospect, very difficult to explain.
In fact, about ten years ago, it was, unlike today, relatively easy to get into these crisis regions.
So, people arrived from Germany, in particular via Pakistan, joined such groups, received training, and were able to return.
These are methods that are nearly impossible today, but they were still possible at the time.
The main attraction for German fighters was probably that these were the only openly accessible armed groups.
It was not easy to join the Taliban in Afghanistan, so these Waziristan-based groups were the natural focal point for German jihadists.
German authorities arrest four IJU operatives including two German Muslim converts and disrupt the group's plans to attack targets inside Germany.
The group is called the Sauerland Cell.
The German security authorities were astounded that these people were essentially domestically radicalized, so-called "home-grown" terrorists.
The Sauerland Cell was the second largest investigation of its kind, the first pertaining to the attacks of September 11, 2001.
Several of the attackers on 9/11 had been radicalized in Hamburg.
They were students at a Hamburg university, they met there, they connected with each other.
Many had also attended the same mosque in Hamburg.
Nine years later, German authorities learn of another cell forming under their watch with links back to Hamburg, only this time they are planning attacks inside Germany itself.
Guido Steinberg is one of Germany's leading authorities on terrorism, and is often called as an objective expert witness during terror trials.
Steinberg also works for the German Institute for International and Security Affairs and is the best-selling author of the book German Jihad.
The first information about this string of plots emerged when single jihadists returned from the Pakistani tribal areas in 2010.
And the most important person was a guy called Ahmed Siddiqui, from Hamburg, an Afghan-German.
Ahmed Siddiqui, a 36-year-old German citizen from Hamburg, is trying to get a new passport from the German embassy in the Afghan capital of Kabul.
He's detained and transferred to the American airbase at Bagram for questioning.
U.
S.
authorities suspect that Ahmed Siddiqui may be an al-Qaeda jihadist who's received training in Pakistan.
During his initial interrogation, Siddiqui insists that he simply moved to Afghanistan with his family to experience life in his native country.
Over the next month, German and U.
S.
intelligence learn that Siddiqui is a member of the notorious Taiba mosque in Hamburg.
Formerly known as Al-Quds, it's the same mosque attended by the 9/11 attackers.
Peter Neumann is a professor of security studies at King's College in London.
There is a reluctance, perhaps, to move too harshly against religions.
And I think that resulted in a situation where German authorities were too careful, and almost hesitant to close down mosques.
Like the mosque in Hamburg, the Al-Quds mosque where some of the 9/11 attackers came from, they were hesitant to close it down for fear of being seen to be interfering with the free exercise of religion.
The question now, "Is Siddiqui part of a larger terror cell or terror plot?" Information detailed by Siddiqui through his interrogation is shared to German authorities back home, who quickly open an investigation into Siddiqui and other possible German co-conspirators.
Ahmed S.
was born in 1974 in Afghanistan to a relatively wealthy Afghan family.
The father was a pilot.
In 1990, in the wake of the civil war in Afghanistan, the family moved to Germany.
He then grew up in Hamburg and had, as far as is known, never gained a foothold there.
The family suffered from financial problems.
Sometime in the late 1990s, he came into contact with the Al-Quds mosque, as it was then called, later the Taiba mosque, in Hamburg.
This is when Ahmed S.
ultimately radicalized.
It remained, basically, a place where radical, if not extreme, people were meeting.
So that's what happened to Siddiqui, too.
He went to that mosque.
He basically got to know the other perpetrators, and what often happened in these places is that not only did people get to know each other, they also became sort of friends.
Ahmed Siddiqui admits that he had met a man at the Taiba mosque named Naamen Meziche, whom he claims persuaded him, along with a number of other young men, to join in jihad.
He described in detail how he was basically being told to watch videos, almost every night, which talked about the suffering of Muslims across the world.
And watching these videos, he got the impression or he started buying into the narrative of the extremists, which is that, basically, the West is at war with Muslims and Islam, and if being a Muslim means anything to him, he needs to fight back, and fight against the West.
And that, basically, that very simple narrative, is what bound these people together ideologically.
That's what basically justified, in their own minds, the idea of going back to the countries in which they had grown up and attacking people, ordinary people in these countries, because, eventually, they regarded the entire society that they lived in as enemy.
Siddiqui and the others began to radicalize and pursue a more active jihadist role.
They developed very tightly-knit, personal relationships, and so, at the end, basically, they went over, they decided to go over to Pakistan, with the intention of going to Afghanistan in two or three trenches.
But they were, at that point, already very tightly-knit.
They were a peer group.
They were a cell.
Siddiqui reveals that he and ten others, including his younger brother, had left Hamburg and traveled to the Afghan-Pakistan border area to attend militant training camps.
The group use several routes to get to Pakistan, some through Iran, and some traveling by air via the Persian Gulf.
German authorities name the group from the Taiba mosque the Tour Group.
There were nine men and two women, all of whom frequented the Taiba mosque, who, probably in 2008, had come up with the idea to travel to the combat zones in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
This group of 11 people split up, Ahmed S.
being the vanguard, one of the first to leave.
It was a very colorful mix of people from different ethnic backgrounds, from Kazakhstan, for example, from Arab countries, all of whom had attended this mosque and had one thing in common: they had never gained a foothold in Germany.
There was a former junkie, there were people who were unemployed.
This departure into the war zones in Afghanistan and Pakistan was certainly some kind of an escape from their failed lives in Germany.
They said, you can come here and you can have a wonderful life, you can come here with your wife and your children, and there are brothers who you can speak your language to, there is a community of German people here, and you can live in accordance with your values.
You no longer have to be in the decadent West where you are being, basically you're feeling oppressed every day.
Ahmed S.
then left for Pakistan in March 2009, he traveled via Doha in Qatar, and then later landed in the tribal areas of Waziristan and spent some time there, initially joining the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, a terrorist group operating there.
That did not work out very well for him.
He sustained a knee injury relatively quickly, and he suffered from malaria.
As opposed to later departures, for example to Syria, the journey alone was very difficult.
Upon arrival in Afghanistan and Pakistan, foreign fighters could not count on having running water or electricity at their disposal.
And of course, they then found out that, basically, none of the things that were being said in the videos were true.
That life really was, actually, quite miserable, and that there were no facilities for people, that they couldn't leave their houses, and this was not a great place to bring up children, basically, in a war zone.
If you look at some of the perpetrators, some of the attackers, they were quite unhealthy.
It's at this time that Siddiqui's father travels to Waziristan, pleading for his sons to leave the terror group and return to Germany with him.
With the younger brother, Suleiman, this clearly worked.
Ahmed S.
remained there by himself.
It was said that the father returned to Germany broken-hearted and without his eldest son.
Once Siddiqui's health recovers, he decides to join al-Qaeda.
Apparently, he provided on-site services for al-Qaeda and his fellow fighters, including IT services, cleaning computers of viruses, restoring laptops, working on software, things where he could make himself useful.
Due to his physical size and knee injury, he was not particularly valuable as a fighter, but he found his role and made his contribution.
Later, he joined al-Qaeda and came into contact with the number-three al-Qaeda sheikh, Younis al-Mauritani, who recruited him.
Al-Mauritani is wanted by U.
S.
authorities.
Siddiqui has to go through elaborate security procedures before being allowed to meet the sheikh.
He says that it takes several weeks before they meet, but once they do, al-Mauritani reveals a new terror plot.
As far as it is known, Sheikh al-Mauritani shared his secret plans with Ahmed S.
He said he had developed ideas for attacks in Europe that had been sanctioned by bin Laden himself.
These attacks were supposed to prove to Europe that al-Qaeda is present and can strike.
So you can assume that this plot had been in the making for at least half a year because getting approval from bin Laden at that point, with the level of attention that had been on him was something very complicated and complex that would have taken a number of months.
But certainly it indicates that al-Qaeda, even at that late stage, 2010, was still looking for an opportunity to attack Western targets, and to, effectively, repeat what they did on 9/11.
Sheikh Younis al-Mauritani wants to carry out coordinated attacks in various countries in Europe, including the U.
K.
, France, Italy, and Germany, similar to the attacks that took place in Mumbai, India on November 26, 2010.
Ten members of Lashkar, a terror group based in Pakistan, carry out a series of 12 coordinated attacks over four days across the city.
The attacks kill 164 people and injure 308.
Al-Qaeda want to replicate these attacks in Europe.
Terror groups are planning to attack inside Germany and other cities in Europe.
In response, the U.
S.
State Department issues a Europe-wide security advisory for Americans traveling overseas, initiating multiple European countries to raise the terror alert to a high threat status.
It was clear that they planned attacks with a high symbolic significance, and that their plan would include several European countries, notably the United Kingdom and France.
In order to prevent the attacks, German and British intelligence, with the help of the United States National Security Agency, work together to locate members of the German cell in the tribal areas of North Waziristan before they can return home to carry out attacks.
President Obama's administration orders missile strikes by unmanned CIA drones against terrorist targets.
They kill several German militants in North Waziristan.
There was a huge pressure on these groups, simply because so many leaders and so many fighters had been killed in the American drone war that was started, by the latest, in 2008.
It was started, still, by the Bush administration, but then the number of attacks rose substantially in the first two years of the Obama administration.
All of these jihadists report that they were frightened, extremely frightened, by the existence of drones in the Pakistani skies, at that time.
Of the more than 200 people who traveled to this region from Germany, many either quickly made their way back, or were killed during combat with Pakistani security agencies, or by American air strikes.
Along with drone strikes in Waziristan, German authorities are also on high alert for threats at home.
The police in Germany have various special units to deal with terrorist threats.
Each state maintains special task forces, or SEKs, which are trained for such attacks.
Additionally, there is the elite unit GSG9, the Grenzschutzgruppe 9, which functions as an elite unit of the Federal Police, and is highly specialized in seizing terrorist offenders.
Just two weeks after the interrogation of Siddiqui, the United States National Security Agency intercept an email between a man named el-Kebir in the city of Düsseldorf and the head of al-Qaeda in Waziristan, Atiyatallah Abu Abd al-Rahman.
Abdeladim el-K.
apparently said to his contact people in Waziristan: "We are still training, but we will keep our promise, and will soon start with the slaughtering of the dogs.
" That was a very clear clue for the terror plot, the imminent attack.
Concerned that the attack may be imminent, German authorities work to gain more intelligence on el-Kebir.
Kebir was in Pakistan for about two months.
He was sent back in May 2010, after having arrived in the area, sometime in spring.
It is obvious that he was in North Waziristan, because he had met important planners of al-Qaeda, who, at that time, were based over there.
In Waziristan, el-Kebir trains with al-Qaeda, and is able to meet with some of its leaders, especially Libyan Abd al-Rahman, head of al-Qaeda in Waziristan, as well as Younis al-Mauritani.
El-Kebir then returns to Düsseldorf in Germany with orders to recruit other members to a terror cell in order to commit a string of bomb attacks in Germany, and create as much chaos and violence as possible.
That's what made bin Laden famous.
He became famous because of 9/11, because he had managed to hurt the most powerful country in the world, and it is that sort of scenario, a mass attack on Western targets within the West, preferably being carried out by people who had been part of these societies.
That's what they were looking for, that's what they were keen on, and that's, to some extent, what they were seeking to replicate.
El-Kebir finds willing jihadists to join this new terror campaign, who help fund the purchase of weapons and explosives.
Jamil S.
provided the apartment on WitzelstraÃe in Düsseldorf, where the bomb was to be built.
Jamil S.
was considered a housing provider, and also a bomb maker.
The then 19-year-old Amid C.
, a German-Iranian student who had been radicalized, was particularly responsible for the encrypted communication between the individual group members.
There was one more person, from Bochum: Halil S.
, who is considered a supporter of this group, was particularly responsible for logistics, but also for fundraising, which he achieved through criminal means at times, for example, through fraudulent transactions on eBay, in order to finance these attacks.
The group of three members, known as the Düsseldorf Cell, begin to purchase chemicals for the bombs.
New intelligence revealed through surveillance raises the stakes again.
German authorities, after receiving the information from the USA, began monitoring the apartment intensively, and also had it bugged.
In intercepted conversations, a bus stop was mentioned where something was supposed to happen.
How determined Abdeladim el-K.
was to commit attacks in Europe, and in Germany, can be recognized in his communications with Pakistan, in which he promises that he would soon start "slaughtering the dogs.
" Apparently, this referred to attacks.
With this new information, German authorities decide it's time to make the arrests.
Three men were arrested in the apartment where they were going to build the bomb, on WitzelstraÃe in Düsseldorf.
The German police had to assume that there was a high-risk factor, which is why Germany's Federal Police elite unit, task force GSG9, was ordered to conduct the arrest of these people.
When GSG9 arrest ringleader Abdeladim el-Kebir, he makes a last-ditch effort, grabs a knife, and tries to attack one of the policemen, but is quickly taken down.
Inside the apartment, of course, bomb-making utensils were found, including the chemical acetone, and the grill lighters that did not contain the chemical hexamine that the bomb makers had expected to find.
However, that also counted as an attempt to make a bomb, an explosive device.
And so, the evidence of what had been found in the apartment was quite conclusive.
With the bomb, they wanted to carry out a spectacular attack in Germany.
They planned on using a cluster bomb.
More evidence is uncovered that helps confirm el-Kebir's guilt: it's a letter found in Osama bin Laden's compound after he is killed by the U.
S.
Navy Seal in Abbottabad, Pakistan.
And on the basis of this letter, court could prove that Abdeladim el-Kebir had, indeed, been in Pakistan, and had, indeed, sworn loyalty to Osama bin Laden.
The problem for the court, now, was to establish whether this letter that was given to the German authorities by the FBI was authentic.
Nobody expected the FBI to send the officials back, but what happened is they appeared, indeed, in court in Düsseldorf in 2012.
It was the very person who had received the Navy SEALs on the tarmac, and he traveled with the materials to the United States.
So they had all the FBI officials who had come into contact with this letter, and, thereby, established a chain of evidence from Abbottabad to the United States to Germany, thereby, establishing that the letter was authentic, and that it originated from the archives of Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad.
And this was, in the end, the evidence that was needed in order to convict Abdeladim el-Kebir and his colleagues.
The letter, authenticated by FBI officials, establishes a chain of evidence from Abbottabad to the United States to Germany that helped convict el-Kebir, along with the other three members of the Düsseldorf Cell.
And it was one of the most interesting trials in my trial history, simply because it showed the inner workings of American counter-terrorism in a very important and exciting episode.
And it showed to what extent a German-American, transatlantic partnership works, if it has too.
It must have been a shock to the American FBI officials to learn that somebody like Kebir would land in jail for only nine years when he would have probably spent more time in jail in the United States, if he had been caught by the Americans.
Several months later, a fourth member of the cell is discovered through email exchanges.
A German-Turk named Halil Simsek made contact with al-Qaeda, telling them he wished to continue with el-Kebir's plans to conduct a bomb attack in Germany.
He asks al-Qaeda for advice.
Even after the arrests of the key members of the Düsseldorf Cell, the danger isn't averted.
The Germans fear that at least one other group affiliated with the Europlot are still active.
Two weeks later, police in Vienna and Germany receive intelligence regarding two individuals who they believe had trained overseas and recently returned to Europe to recruit members to an al-Qaeda affiliated cell.
Both Lodin and Ocak are on Germany's watchlist because they had appeared in propaganda videos for the German Taliban.
The German Taliban Mujahideen they only existed between September 2009 and April 2010, but they started a huge propaganda offensive against the German state.
For the first time, Germany had to cope with several videos, messages, that were sent in German language, threatening Germany with attacks.
Of course, it was also important for recruiting people, that young, potentially-radicalized Muslims in Germany could see that their fellow believers actually went there, that they spoke to them in German, had a high propaganda value, which certainly played an important role in the recruitment of people.
What these videos communicated was that there was a place for people to go, um, and that this was a place where people could go, at some point they said, with their entire families.
So these videos were also significant because they turned some of the people that had gone there into semi-celebrities, in the sense that, of course, these videos were being reported about in the media, and there was a lot of coverage, and some of the people that starred in these videos became well known figures.
When the German Taliban disbanded, several key members, including Lodin and Ocak, joined al-Qaeda.
Authorities discover the pair had been selected by al-Mauritani and al-Qaeda to travel to Europe and recruit new members.
Sheikh Mauritani was looking to recruit people who came from Europe, who knew their way around, who were ready to attack in Europe and to establish cells there.
When he met Maqsood L.
and Yusuf O.
, he is quoted to have said that they were the ideal candidates.
And the plan was to recruit friends, former friends, but both were arrested.
The whole story did not seem so spectacular.
What was spectacular was what was found on thumb drives that they carried on their bodies.
The discovery of the USB sticks was a stroke of luck for the German security authorities.
They contained documents, which first had to be laboriously decrypted.
At first glance, they appeared to contain pornography.
Buried inside the USB drive is a pornographic video called Kick Ass, and a file marked Sexy Tanja.
But behind the pornography was hidden documents.
They had brought with them internal al-Qaeda papers, strategy papers about future work in Europe.
And that was the first major insight, besides the Osama bin Laden Abbottabad papers, into internal discussions.
And, as it seems, there had been a long discussion in leadership circles in Pakistan about how the organization should react to all its problems in 2008, 2009, to 2010.
So many of its leaders, so many of its personnel had been killed already in 2010.
The organization had not been able to perpetrate a larger attack since the London bombings in 2005.
And the document "Future Work" contained some of the most influential thoughts in al-Qaeda strategic discussions in all these years.
The "Future Works" document on the thumb drive describes kidnapping known figures, putting them in orange jumpsuits and killing them on video.
It also contains instructions on how to send the videos back to al-Qaeda.
Yusuf O.
and Maqsood L.
were both brought to trial in Berlin.
They were convicted of membership in a terrorist organization.
The court determined that both pose an imminent threat, which led to prison sentences of nine years for Yusuf O.
and six years for Maqsood L.
Information on the thumb drive along with documents found at Osama bin Laden's hideout confirm that the Europlot is primarily a German phenomenon, and an outcome of targeted recruitment campaigns.
And in 2010, Germans must have constituted the biggest contingent of foreign fighters, of Western fighters, in the Pakistani tribal areas, at least if you don't count Turks as European foreign fighters.
And so, it was only logical that when recruits were sent back by al-Qaeda to perpetrate attacks in Europe, there would be a strong German element to it.
And we know about the two groups who then tried to build structures in Berlin, Vienna, and in Düsseldorf, and perpetrate attacks.
And we know about certain individuals who left Pakistan in 2010 and who might have been a part of this Europlot.
The plot disclosed by Ahmed Siddiqui leads to the discovery of the terror cells in Düsseldorf, Berlin, and Vienna, but the flow of online propaganda targeting Western jihadists may have instigated attacks by lone operatives as well.
Many believe the terror attacks perpetrated in France in 2012 are tied to al-Qaeda's Europlot.
The attacks take place over eight days from March 11 through March 19, and start with a man who shoots and kills a French army paratrooper in the city of Toulouse.
It's followed by a second attack four days later that kills two uniformed French soldiers and seriously injures another in the city of Montauban.
The third attack targets children at the Ozar Hatorah Jewish Day School in Toulouse.
Four people, including a teacher and three children, are killed, four others are wounded.
Police identify the shooter as Mohammed Merah, a 23-year-old French petty criminal of Algerian descent who was born and raised in Toulouse.
He is killed after a 30-hour siege.
One of the recent theories is a form of leaderless jihadism.
There is no central leadership, and people simply operate on their own.
There's a lot of truth in that, but it's also not the whole story.
The Islamic State, in its terrorist form, sees itself as a kind of franchise company.
Meaning, that it is possible to declare one's loyalty to the Islamic State, and then, following its demands, to commit attacks without any specific agreements.
In this respect, a leaderless jihad is indeed born.
And this is a pattern, um, that al-Qaeda has engaged in for many, many years, in the sense that the top people tell some of their subordinates to attack, but they leave it to them to figure out what targets are best.
And this seems to have been the case here too.
Many assume Mohammed Merah is a lone wolf, but new evidence reveals that he had visited Pakistan's tribal areas in early 2010.
Many see this association and time period as being a clear link to the Europlot.
I am convinced that Mohammad Merah was a part of the Europlot, other observers are not.
His would be the only successful attack.
The others had been stopped or arrested.
So, if the Europlot had been successful, given the number of individuals involved, given, also, the expertise that they had been able to acquire, building proper explosive devices multiple explosions in numerous cities across the continent, that could easily have caused hundreds of fatalities.
There might have been a real panic in European societies because, let's not forget, terrorism is not just about inflicting physical pain, it's also about creating a psychological effect on societies.
So you might have seen a real polarization within European societies.
Extremists not only on the jihadist side, but also on the far-right side becoming stronger, perhaps spaces in the mainstream becoming narrow, revenge attacks against mosques and, basically, a poisoning of European societies that, thankfully, has not happened yet.
In spite of these police and intelligence successes it also illustrates Germany's shortcomings.
Ocak and Lodin were already monitored when they arrived.
There is no conclusive information about how they were caught, but my suspicion is, that, again, American security authorities informed their European colleagues that these people were coming back.
It seems, after all, that the NSA and the CIA had quite privileged insights into al-Qaeda communications at that time, because it is quite astounding that all the individuals who were sent back to Germany at that time, and there might have been one or two others, were caught.
And if you consider that the German intelligence services are relatively weak, they've got no assets in Turkey or in Iran, they really don't know about travel movements from Pakistan via Iran, Turkey, and the Balkans to Germany, I am positive, I am convinced, that the first information, again, came from Washington.
Germany is freeloading, to some extent, because almost all of the plots that have been thwarted and discovered in Germany were thwarted and discovered because of signals intelligence received from the NSA, from the Americans.
And, unfortunately, that is a problem of the German system.
In the German system, the intelligence services are weak and the police is strong.
And the police normally tend to arrest people as early as possible, in order to be on the safe side.
While intelligence services, intelligence officials, are a lot more curious, and they are not as risk averse as the police.
But because the police are so influential, most of the German plots are thwarted before it is really well-known what the target is.
One particular challenge we face is collecting the information that the military or foreign intelligence services generate in crisis areas, like currently in Syria, and to utilize it effectively for law enforcement agencies, both overseas and domestically.
We all must find a way of generating the transmission of information, first, more quickly and second, more easily.
The Europlot was the second most significant plot in Germany after the Sauerland plot.
It certainly captured people's imagination, it shocked society, it was headline news for a couple of days, even for a week.
But like all thwarted plots, I think the effects were rather short term.
We didn't see major change in Germany after it.
And to some extent, to this day, we still have a lot of the problems in Germany with a lack of communication between the different states, lots of different agencies doing the same thing with difficulty of doing proper surveillance that is a lot easier in a lot of other European countries.
So none of the issues have really been resolved.
Al-Qaeda's new strategy of smaller attacks is also a challenge for security.
Germany has comparatively strict gun laws, which make it very difficult for suspected terrorists to obtain firearms.
The possession of knives is almost impossible to regulate, and licensing wouldn't do much either.
Cars, used as ramming weapons, are also very difficult to control.
Thus, it is up to the security authorities, together with our other administrative partners, to minimize these attacks as much as possible.
In the personal sphere, by trying to recognize potential attackers earlier in order to be able to intervene as early as possible.
Another challenge to authorities is monitoring and reducing online propaganda initiated by al-Qaeda and other terrorist organizations.
For example, propaganda distribution via social media is something that the Islamic State has mastered.
For the first time in history, it is now possible to deliver large amounts of ideological propaganda in a very short time to many people.
Therefore, statistically, the likelihood that some people will actually fall victim to this propaganda and join these groups is far higher than in the past.
My impression is that ideology is more important than every other factor.
That's mainly because I do not see any socio-economic profile.
So terrorism is not a middle-class phenomenon among German jihadists, but it's also not a lower-class, a working-class, phenomenon, or of those who don't have any jobs at all.
And that leaves ideology.
The only way to get acquainted with jihadist ideology in 2001 is to read books written by Arab preachers, or to go to Salafist preachers in Germany who all speak Arabic.
Though Ahmed S.
was born in Afghanistan, and later trained in weapons and explosives there, he spent most of his life in Germany.
And above all, and that is the important point, he was radicalized here in Hamburg.
He is, like the others from the Düsseldorf Cell, a home-grown terrorist, and not a person who was sent from the outside.
Although he had spent time in Afghanistan, his homeland was Germany, and the decisive question is, where did the radicalization take place? It is quite clear that this radicalization process occurred in Germany.
The importance of so-called radicalization nodes, or radicalization hubs, particularly places where people can exchange views and share radical content without being noticed.
One of those radicalization hubs is believed to be the notorious Al-Quds mosque, renamed Taiba after 9/11.
It's here that so many of the German jihadists claim to have been radicalized.
As a result of Siddiqui's arrest and confession, authorities in Hamburg decide to shut down the mosque.
There are a multitude of challenges which German society must tackle if it wants to be prepared for the future in the face of terror.
On the one hand, it is about reducing the reservoir of people who are willing to commit themselves to terror.
It's about making people offers.
It is important that many of the immigrants have prospects so that they are not prone to terror.
This is a task for society as a whole, where it is also about discrimination and racism.
You can see that the Salafists are very successful in recruiting people on the Internet.
A well-known German-Israeli psychologist once said, "They are the better social workers.
" That means, we also need social workers on the Internet who try to prevent such people from falling into the hands of the Salafists.
It is necessary to assemble all parties, not only the security authorities, but also civic actors, and other resources, such as schools, kindergartens, social and youth welfare offices, behind a unified strategy in order to prevent more people from joining this extremist ideology.
Many still credit the support of the United States intelligence agencies as being a key factor in stopping plots against Germany.
I think in 2010, 2011, we were, first, extremely lucky.
Um, and we were extremely lucky that we had such a strong ally.
In fact, we have outsourced parts of our counter-terrorism to the United States.
That is good, as long as the United States is a reliable partner.
I am not sure whether that will be the case in the future, and so we have to do our homework in this regard, um regardless of how the transatlantic relationship works.