"We didn't want to kill two or three U.S. soldiers, but rather many," Fritz Gelowicz, the alleged ringleader of the so-called Sauerland terror cell, said earlier this week in the regional court of Duesseldorf.

It was a grim reminder of what could have happened if police hadn't arrested Gelowicz and his three accomplices, German nationals Daniel Schneider and Attila Selek and Turkish-born Adem Yilmaz, after intense surveillance in September 2007.

The homegrown terrorists are charged with planning a series of bomb attacks against U.S. and other targets in Germany. Their trial started Monday in Duesseldorf, and the first few days have been characterized by a series of rather open confessions.

Gelowicz, 29, on Tuesday spoke of his motivation to become a terrorist -- he said the United States' war on terror, its campaign in Iraq and the pictures coming out of the prison facilities at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay showed him that "the West was leading a war against Islam," Spiegel Online quotes him as saying.

But what really sent him down the road to violence was the kidnapping of Khaled el-Masri, a man Gelowicz met frequently at a mosque in the southern German city of Ulm. El-Masri, a German national, was kidnapped by the Central Intelligence Agency and flown to Afghanistan where he was interrogated and abused before being released because the CIA found out it had captured the wrong guy.

"That was the straw that broke the camel's back," Gelowicz said.

A day earlier, the alleged ringleader of the cell had told the court that the group had planned to attack several U.S. targets in Germany -- among them Ramstein Air Base and several bars frequented by U.S. troops.

They received their training at a camp of the Islamic Jihad Union in Pakistan's Waziristan region, Gelowicz said Monday. The men wanted to join active fighting in Iraq or Chechnya but were convinced to return to Europe to plot terror attacks.

On Tuesday, Yilmaz told the court of the cell's plan to stage "smaller explosions" at the Duesseldorf or Dortmund airports, in a bid to disrupt air traffic. He said they didn't want to place larger bombs because the airports were too crowded.

"We would have done it if we had found a place where there weren't so many people," Yilmaz told the court, according to Deutsche Welle. "We didn't want to hurt innocent people. We could have hit Muslims, and we didn't want to do that."

Yilmaz added that he still believed in radical Islam, saying that he was determined to die as a martyr. The next days will see confessions of the other two suspects.

Speculating on lighter sentences, the four men have already confessed to the German Federal Police -- their testimonials fill more than 1,000 pages, Spiegel Online reports.

The Sauerland cell is named after a region in western Germany where three of them were arrested in September 2007. Authorities found in their hideout 26 detonators and 12 barrels of hydrogen peroxide, which can be used to make explosives. (Hydrogen peroxide was used in the London bombings). Selek was arrested some weeks later in Turkey.

It's one of the biggest terrorism trials in Germany since those against the members of the far-left Red Army Faction in the 1970s.

Share This Article With Planet Earth

del.icio.us	Digg	Reddit
YahooMyWeb	Google	Facebook

Related Links
The Long War - Doctrine and Application

Memory Foam Mattress Review

SPACE MEDIA NETWORK PROMOTIONS Solar Energy Solutions Tempur-Pedic Mattress Comparison ... Newsletters :: SpaceDaily :: SpaceWar :: TerraDaily :: Energy Daily XML Feeds :: Space News :: Earth News :: War News :: Solar Energy News