German legislators want an investigation and analysis of claims that the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) plotted to murder an alleged al-Qaeda fundraiser in Hamburg, and if the American spy agency placed agents in Germany to sweep up terrorist suspects without informing German authorities. The CIA had 25 agents in Germany after the September 11 attacks and planned to “rendition” illegally al-Qaeda suspects without telling the German government, Spiegel magazine reported.
That came on the heels of a report in the US magazine Vanity Fair about the alleged plot to kill the suspected al-Qaeda member.
Wolfgang Bosbach, of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats (CDU), said his Internal Affairs Committee in Parliament would look into alleged CIA plans targeting Syrian-born Mamoun Darkazanli. Vanity Fair reported that that the CIA sent a team from the private security firm Blackwater, now Xe, to Hamburg to “find, fix and finish” Darkazanli, 51. In its previous name of Blackwater, the American security company was accused of killing civilians in Iraq, but was cleared in a US court, although settled in civil court with family members of those shot dead in Baghdad in an incident two years ago.
Darkazanli, who has a German passport, was an associate of several of the Hamburg suicide attackers who used hijacked jets to kill almost 3,000 people on September 11, 2001 in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania. Germany investigated him but did not try him. Darkazanli, in a television interview, said he suspected there was a US plot to murder him. Just recently he had noticed cars which could be connected to such a plot, he added. “It has not stopped. Nobody knew, who was after me,” Darkazanli told ARD television. He had even found suspicious electronic components in his wife’s car, he added.
Bosbach said the Left Party placed the subject on the Internal Affairs Comittee agenda for January 27, confirming a report by daily Sueddeutsche Zeitung. The German government and the state of Hamburg have denied knowledge of the alleged CIA plans but Hamburg prosecutors said they would study the claims. The Blackwater team allegedly kept Darkazanli under surveillance for weeks but withdrew when there was no order to assassinate him. ”I expect the federal government to contact the United States government and ask for a complete inquiry into the facts,” said Christoph Ahlhaus, Interior Minister of Hamburg.

Secret plots?
Darkazanli continued to live openly in Hamburg after the September 11 attacks. “If there is evidence that US organizations were operationally active in Germany in this way without the knowledge of their German counterparts, we can’t just act as if nothing happened.” Ahlhaus, who supervises the state police and anti-subversion agency, said they knew nothing of such a mission.
Spain twice sought his extradition, but Germany refused. He was allegedly the European liaison and fund-raiser for al-Qaeda from 1993 to 1998. Germany was earlier upset by the treatment of Khaled el-Masri, a German of Lebanese descent who says he was arrested in FYROM in 2003 and flown by the CIA to Afghanistan, then freed in May 2004 without charge.
In the other report, German authorities said they also wanted to look into claims about what the European Parliament has complained for several years were unlawful renditions from EU countries of suspected terrorists, which led to an investigation that found there had been, noticeably in Poland and reported in Lithuania. “It was about grabbing people without the Germans knowing about it,” Spiegel reported, citing an unnamed former CIA agent as saying. “We were planning stuff that was totally illegal.” The plan went so far that other parts of the CIA were in the loop, but in the end it was scrapped because of objections by the agency’s German section, Spiegel cited its source as saying. “We said ‘no’ because we were of the opinion that you just couldn’t do a thing like that in a friendly country where there were so many US soldiers based,” the source is cited as saying.
Spiegel also contradicted part of the Vanity Fair report. Darkanzali was detained by German authorities in 2004 but prosecutors dropped their investigation in 2006, saying that although he had served as a contact for several Al-Qaeda members, he could not be considered a member. Spiegel, however, cited its source as denying there was any such plan, saying: “That would have been completely impossible in a country like Germany.”The “extraordinary rendition” program was set up by the administration of then president George W. Bush after the attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people. It involved the transfer of “war on terror” suspects by the CIA to countries known to practice torture. In November, 2009, an Italian court convicted in absentia 23 US secret agents for the CIA’s kidnapping of an Egyptian cleric in 2003, including the CIA’s Milan station chief at the time, Robert Seldon Lady.