German police shut down a mosque in the northern city of Hamburg Monday frequented by suicide hijackers from the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks in the United States, authorities said.
An affiliated cultural center was also closed.
"The Hamburg interior department closed the Arab-German cultural club Taiba," the department said in a statement. "The former al-Quds mosque was also closed."
"We have closed the mosque because it was a recruiting and meeting point for Islamist radicals who wanted to participate in so-called jihad or holy war," said Frank Reschreiter, a spokesman for Hamburg’s state interior ministry.
He said that 20 police officers were searching the building and had confiscated material, including several computers. He was not aware of any arrests.
German media reported that suspected Islamist militants had been using the site in the city’s Sankt Georg quarter as a meeting place.
Recruitment center
Three of the Sept.11 hijackers including their ringleader Mohammed Atta, who piloted the first plane into New York’s World Trade Center, met frequently at al-Quds mosque before moving to the United States.
Authorities said the prayer house served as a recruitment center for fellow jihadists, including accomplices of the hijackers.
Reschreiter said it was the first time the mosque had been closed, and that it had been under observation by local intelligence officers for "quite a long time."
A 2009 report by the Hamburg branch of Germany’s domestic intelligence agency also said the mosque had again become the "center of attraction for the jihad scene" in the northern port city.
It said some people who belonged to the mosque’s cultural association and prayed there had traveled to a radical training camp in Uzbekistan.
A group of 11 militants that traveled to military training camps in Uzbekistan in March 2009 was formed at Taiba mosque, the report said.
Most of the group’s members were either German converts, of Middle Eastern origin or from the Caucasus region.
"A very important factor for the radicalization of the group members was certainly their joint visits to the mosque," the intelligence report stated.
It appears that one man from the group joined the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, a terrorist organization in Central Asia, the report said.