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Egyptian Paints European Houses Cheaply, Blows Up Trains Freely
From The Washington Post.... German authorities jailed the Arabic-speaking man in June 1999 and prepared to deport him. But they were unable to confirm his identity or figure out where to send him, so they moved him to a loosely supervised asylum camp for illegal immigrants. Officials there paid little attention when he vanished two weeks before the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in the United States. The man who would later be code-named "Mohamed the Egyptian" by his Islamic radical friends resumed his illegal travels across Europe in 2001, taking advantage of the continent's open borders to move freely among Germany, Spain, France, Italy and possibly other countries. Over the next three years, investigators say, he recruited volunteers for suicide missions, frequented fundamentalist mosques and played a key role in planning the biggest terror attack on European soil, the train bombings in Madrid on March 11 this year. All along, Mohamed -- whose legal name is Rabei Osman Sayed Ahmed -- was able to dodge police and counterterrorism officials in at least three countries. They repeatedly put him on watch lists under a variety of names, but failed to figure out what he was up to .... On Sept. 6, 2001, a few days after he left Germany for good, he visited the Egyptian Embassy in Madrid and applied for a duplicate passport, saying he had lost his old one, the official said. That is a common trick in producing false identity documents -- the old passport is altered and given to someone else. Posted by: Mike Sylwester 2004-11-14 |
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