Al Qaeda's German bombers working on deadline

Reuters:

Three suspected Islamist militants who were planning to attack American targets in Germany had orders to act by September 15 and knew police were hot on their trail before their arrest, a magazine said on Saturday.

The plan was foiled on Tuesday when police arrested two German converts to Islam and a Turk in the biggest German police investigation in the last 30 years.

According to surveillance details published in Der Spiegel magazine, the men had been given a two-week deadline for their planned strikes in a late August call from northern Pakistan that was monitored by German police.

In another detail to emerge on Saturday, a spokeswoman for the Federal Prosecutors Office in Karlsruhe confirmed a Focus magazine report that the suspects had obtained three small used vans in France and brought them to Germany.

The suspected militants, identified by German media as Fritz Gelowicz, Daniel Martin Schneider and Adem Yilmaz, had material to make bombs with power equal to 550 kilograms of TNT and were believed to be planning simultaneous car bombs across Germany.

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Officials have said all three had trained in militant camps in Pakistan before forming a domestic cell of the "Islamic Jihad Union" -- a little known al Qaeda-affiliated Sunni Muslim group with roots in Uzbekistan.

According to Der Spiegel, two of the militants mentioned "a disco filled with American sluts" along with airports, nightclubs or a U.S. military base as targets during a July 20 conversation that was bugged by police.

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The three suspects were aware they were under close police observation, Der Spiegel said. At one point, one of the suspects got out of a car at a traffic light, calmly walked back to an unmarked police vehicle behind him and slashed its tyres.

The arrests were the culmination of an investigation that began a year ago, when U.S. officials alerted German authorities to e-mails intercepted from Pakistan.

...

Will the GCLU try to get them released because their communications were intercepted? On top of that the NSA took time from reading children's email to Iraq to discover an al Qaeda plot. Bob Barr will be appalled. Note that some of the communications intercepted were from Pakistan directly into Germany including the one giving the deadline. Would the Germans have been able to do that without the NSA intercept? What if the writer had put a cc: to someone in the US? As the idiocy of the terrorist rights' and al Qaeda's useful idiots' argument becomes more apparent, expect them to become more hysterical.

Power Line notes the significance of the September 15 deadline, it is the date of Gen. Petraeus' report to Congress.