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.
© 2007 dpa - Deutsche Presse-Agentur 
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