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Frankfurt Shooting Suspect Had Links to Radical Islamists

04 March 2011 21:17 (UTC +04:00)

Baku â€“ APA. The suspected gunman who killed two U.S. servicemen at Frankfurt airport Wednesday had links to Germany’s radical Islamist circles, but German investigators say they currently believe he carried out the attack on his own, APA reports quoting â€œThe Wall Street Journalâ€.
Investigators suspect Arid Uka, a 21-year-old ethnic Albanian whose family moved to Germany from Kosovo, had an "Islamist" motivation for firing at U.S. Air Force personnel on a bus at the airport, according to the office of Germany’s chief federal prosecutor, Monika Harms.
Among other leads, German authorities are investigating witness statements that Mr. Uka had befriended more than two years ago a known Islamist, Rami Makanesi, a Syrian-German currently in German custody on terror-related charges. Mr. Makanesi, frequented the radical mosque in Hamburg where leaders of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks met and prayed.
German prosecutors are expected to charge Mr. Uka, who was arrested shortly after the attack, with murder, attempted murder and aggravated assault at his arraignment in the southern German city of Karlsruhe on Thursday.
The shooting took place on a U.S. military bus where members of an Air Force Security Forces team, a type of military police, were waiting to be driven from Frankfurt airport to the U.S. airbase at Ramstein, Germany. The airmen were based at RAF Lakenheath in the U.K. and were passing through Germany en route to Afghanistan, said Air Force spokeswoman Maj. Beverly Mock.
Frankfurt police say the gunman argued with the bus driver, who was also a U.S. serviceman, as he forced his way onto the bus, before shooting several rounds with a handgun and running away. Two German police officers and an uninjured American airman caught and disarmed the suspected attacker.
The bus driver, who was based at Ramstein, and a serviceman based at RAF Lakenheath were killed, while two other servicemen were wounded, one critically. Their names were being withheld Thursday.
Boris Rhein, interior minister of the German state of Hesse, said Mr. Uka had confessed to being the gunman. Mr. Uka’s lawyer couldn’t be reached to comment.
German antiterrorist officials say they hadn’t previously identified Mr. Uka as a potential militant. "We don’t have a file on him. He is the type of terrorist we worry most aboutâ€”the unknown threat," said a senior intelligence official. German security officials are searching through Mr. Uka’s belongings and electronic records for links to possible accomplices, so far without success. "He appears to be a lone wolf," the official said.
However, authorities are investigating witness claims that Mr. Uka met Mr. Makanesi, the Islamist in jail, more than two years ago while the latter lived in Frankfurt in the same building as Mr. Uka. Mr. Makanesi is awaiting trial on charges of supporting terrorist activities in Pakistan. A German counterterrorism official said investigators don’t yet know how significant the suspected contact between Messrs. Uka and Makanesi might have been.
Mr. Uka had also made contact via the Internet with some well-known Germany-based radical Islamists. A review of Mr. Uka’s Facebook page revealed links to dozens of people and Islamic organizations that have recently been the focus of German police investigations.
Among Mr. Uka’s Facebook friends was Sven Lau, deputy chairman of Invitation to Paradise, an organization that German authorities are seeking to ban based on allegations that it supports extremist Islamist ideology, including a call to impose Islamic law in place of Germany’s constitution. Mr. Lau said Thursday that he knows several of Mr. Uka’s Facebook friends but denied ever meeting Mr. Uka in person. "When you have more than 1,000 Facebook friends, you can’t know all of them," Mr. Lau said.
On his Facebook profile, Mr. Uka made plain his Islamist political leanings and approval of jihad, as well as his love of first-person shooter computer games such as "Call of Duty: Black Ops."
Late last month, Mr. Uka posted comments on his Facebook page about German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s support for Israel. " ’Germany must support Israel under all circumstances’ means we’re on the side of the Jews. That is like a declaration of war" on Muslims, Mr. Uka wrote, referring to Ms. Merkel as a "kafira," or infidel.
Facebook Inc. took down Mr. Uka’s profile Thursday afternoon after he was identified as the shooter, a company spokeswoman said.
Offline, Mr. Uka led an inconspicuous life before this week, say people who knew him at a local school and at his apartment block in a modest Frankfurt suburb.
"I didn’t believe he was the one. No one believes it," said the real-estate manager of the run-down 1970s tower block where Mr. Uka lived with his parents and two brothers. The manager, who asked not to be named, described Mr. Uka as "quiet" and "polite" and "didn’t seem at all to be an extremist."
Mr. Uka was also known as a quiet, diligent student at the nearby Eduard Spranger School, which he attended until 2007. "Nobody expected this," a school official said. Mr. Uka successfully completed a vocational education at another another Frankfurt high school last summer, the school confirmed.
In January, Mr. Uka began a temporary job at the international letter-sorting office of Germany’s postal service, Deutsche Post AG, at Frankfurt airport. A Deutsche Post spokesman said there was never anything suspicious about Mr. Uka.
The apartment-block manager said Mr. Uka’s father, a roofer, bought the family’s second-floor apartment in 1997. The 12-story concrete block, with a brown pebble facade and peeling paint, stands on a dead-end street in a poor suburb of Frankfurt where many immigrants live.
On Wednesday night, after the shooting at the airport, police swarmed the apartment building, searching both the Uka family’s apartment and a storage cellar. Mr. Uka’s father was unable to open the cellar and told police that his son had the key, the manager said. Mr. Uka’s father, reached by telephone Thursday, declined to comment on his son’s arrest.
The Air Force offered its sympathies to the victims’ families. "Our hearts go out to the family and friends of those airmen who were killed and wounded in yesterday’s attack," Gen. Mark A. Welsh III, commander of U.S. Air Forces in Europe, said in a prepared statement Thursday. "We are working closely with German authorities to fully investigate this incident. Despite this terrible tragedy, we believe Germany is a safe place for our airmen and their families to live and work," he said.