Mosque in Germany used by 9/11 plotters is shuttered

Hamburg: The authorities in Hamburg said Monday that they had shut down the mosque there where several of the hijackers involved in the September 11 attacks had met because it remained a source of radicalization nearly a decade later.

The Masjid Taiba mosque, known at the time of the hijackings in 2001 as Al Quds mosque, was "closed effective immediately," according to a statement by the Hamburg Interior Ministry.

The mosque's closing came after a group of radicalized young people associated with the mosque, most of whom were German citizens with roots in Muslim countries, traveled last year to the border region between Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Police searched the mosque and the apartments of leading members starting at 6 a.m., and seized the group's assets. Photographs published on the Web site of the daily newspaper Hamburger Abendblatt showed police carrying computers out of the mosque in Hamburg's St. Georg neighborhood.

"Today we closed the Taiba mosque because young men were being turned into religious fanatics there," said Christoph Ahlhaus, secretary of the interior for the city of Hamburg, at a news conference Monday. "Behind the scenes, a supposed cultural organization shamelessly used the freedoms of our democratic rule of law to promote holy war."

The mosque achieved worldwide notoriety in the wake of the September 11, 2001, attacks. Mohamed Atta, Marwan al-Shehhi, and other members of 9/11 plot used the mosque on Steindamm, near Hamburg's main train station, as a meeting place.

A report released in May by the Interior Ministry said that the mosque "remains the central attraction for the Jihadist scene."

According to the Interior Ministry report, a group of 11 people who met at the mosque traveled from Hamburg to the border region between Pakistan and Afghanistan in March 2009, probably with the goal of training at a militant camp there. One of the 11 was detained in Pakistan and sent back to Germany.

A spokesman for the Interior Ministry, Ralf Kunz, said that the mosque had been under observation since 2001, but that the investigation intensified after the group's trip last year. In order to clear the high bar for banning an organization, particularly a religious one, "intelligence work was necessary, and that can take time," Mr. Kunz said.

"We gathered enough material that the court ruled we could perform our searches there and that we could ban the organization," Mr. Kunz said.

German intelligence officials have expressed concerns over the growing number of young Germans drawn into the militant Islamist scene and the possibility that they could return from the Pakistan-Afghanistan border region to commit acts of terror.

In addition to closing the mosque, the authorities banned the cultural association that ran it, which was founded in 1993. The name of the mosque was changed from Al Quds to Taiba in 2008.