Date: 14 Sep 2001 23:23:00 +0200 From: ASWAD-AT-anarch.free.de (catkawin) Subject: Hamburg connection ---- I don't know when this will eventually get out - my server seems to have problems; I haven't been able to send/receive anything since Wednesday ----- Thursday: Please don't assume I can tell you much more than what you can pick up at CNN - German authorities have ordered an information ban tonight. Although the first flats were raided the night before already, not even all local papers carried articles about this today (I live in Hamburg). Papers only gave scarce info - e.g. I learned the name of the second Hamburg based person from CNN tonight, although papers/TV mentioned Mohammed Atta by name. What papers wrote was that two persons who bought tickets for the two flights taking off from Boston had lived in Hamburg until earlier this year. Late-late-late TV news yesterday said that the flat was supposed to have been empty since February, but today's TV news said and showed that an Arab womyn was taken out of the flat by police and is said to be questioned. The flat they lived in was situated in the quarter of Harburg which is south of the river Elbe. - Harburg was added to the city of Hamburg in 1937, it used to be autonomous before, and it is a sort of neglected part of the city. There are some posh areas on the outskirts, but the center is pretty neglected with a lot of poor people. One of the measures to do something for Harburg was the opening of a technical university, and the two persons were said to have entered Germany regularly with student visas and were enrolled at Harburg Tech, for electronics (Atta) and shipbuilding resp. Atta was said to have finished his studies with a diploma (M.Sc.). Atta and Al Shahhir were said to have been on the planes hitting both WTC towers, and apparently police found a last letter from Atta to his family parked at Boston airport. Local and national news features tonight reported that another person was arrested in Hamburg; he is said to be Mohammad B., 60, from Tunisia, and it was mentioned he was arrested in his flat in the quarter of Hamm. All in all four flats were said to be raided, but nothing else. It seems more arrests have been made, but no info available. (State channel late-late news just said that two persons have been arrested in Hamburg, and that was it. I switched to a private channel who takes over Sky and NBC during night hours now and they just said that more flats in Hamburg-Hamm have been raided and more arrests are said to have been made in Hamm, but Hamburg police does not provide any more info.) Atta and his friend Al Shahhir seem to have been the two persons who took a flight course in Florida. But there is diverging info being reported on CNN and German TV stations: Already yesterday, they interviewed a number of experts on German TV, e.g. an airforce general, some person from the pilots' association. They all, in contradiction to everything I picked up on CNN, said that the persons flying the planes must have definitely known a lot about flying and were quite certain and definite that they couldn't have picked up the necessary knowledge in a crash course. Tonight I managed to switch channels in time to pick up another interview with an expert, complete with computer animation. He also said that both pilots hitting the WTC knew damn well what they were doing and how to do it. One thing he said is that they obviously knew *where* to hit the buildings to cause maximum damage as both buildings were hit at a point to make them instable. He then showed a comp animation of one flight and said the way the plane was flown - with a turn very close in front of the tower - indicated that the pilot on this plane had a military training as this was a usual procedure in airforce flights. This is in sharp contrast to what I picked up on CNN (and this was in part repeated on NBC which we picked up because a German station transmitted the NBC reports) which said that it was not that much of a problem to keep the plane going once it's in the air, with the flight instructor having said that although they were training people on much smaller engines, they would have managed to fly the Jumbos from their training. This was more or less repeated tonight when CNN reported more from the instructor's evidence who said that the two men only wanted to be trained how to change course and he wouldn't remember they did anything else during the training which was a bit on the unusual side. Another thing I picked up from German news tonight is that an Iranian refugee (whose appeal for asylum here in Germany was turned down and who had been taken into deportation custody) earlier this year phoned US secret service and meant to inform them about an attack planned for New York with planes, but apparently he did not manage to speak to anyone important there and seems not to have been taken serious. catkawin ## CrossPoint v3.12d ##
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