Fresh strand to 9-11 plot discovered in German city

Sep 10, 2007, 11:06 GMT

Berlin - A child attending kindergarten in a poor city in Germany uncovered a previously unknown strand in the September 11, 2001 plot, a German broadcaster said Monday.

The boy, aged 5 at the time, overheard Arabic-speaking men gloating about the attack in advance and told his kindergarten teacher on September 10, a day before the terrorist attacks, WDR said in a radio special.

Three Arab students attending university in the German city of Hamburg had been recruited by the al-Qaeda terrorist network as suicide pilots for the attacks on New York and Washington.

Investigators claim five other Hamburg students were in the know.

WDR said the new disclosure showed young men in another city were also aware in advance of the attack.

Authorities in the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia dismissed the radio report, saying police had thoroughly reviewed the evidence in the year after the attack and did not consider it important.

'We don't think the history of September 11 has to be completely rewritten because of this,' state interior ministry spokesman Ludger Harmeier told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa.

The broadcaster said the evidence came from Duisburg, the tough German city which was in the headlines in August when six people were shot dead in an Italian gang feud.

Giving the child the cover name Mustafa, WDR said he was attending Koran school when he heard the men in another room at the mosque speak of an aeroplane crashing into a building and killing many people.

The boy told the kindergarten teacher, who thought it was childish babbling. She did not tell police till the next day, after the attack. WDR said men at the mosque, including the boy's father, knew the Hamburg plotters.

In an 'internal report,' police had identified some of the men overheard by the boy.

WDR linked the men to Mohamedou Ould Slahi, a Mauritanian who was currently prisoner number 760 at the US detention camp at Guantanamo on Cuba.

The broadcaster said student Ould Slahid had registered a company in Germany in 1998 as a front to transfer al-Qaeda funds, was involved in other plots at the time and recruited two of the hijack pilots in 1999 in Duisburg.

It said he had returned to Mauritania in mid-2001, before the conversation was overheard, and was later arrested there and extradited to US custody.