The trial of a 21-year-old Islamist starts in Hamburg. He is said to have planned a devastating attack with “cooking pot bombs”. What worries the authorities is that his father is already well known to police investigators.
The man, who had an e-mail address under the alias “Dieter Hahn”, had very specific wishes: he needed a hand grenade, plus sticks of C4 plastic explosive, detonators and two Glock pistols. He lives in Germany, in the Hamburg area.
But the request did not end up with an arms dealer in the Darknet, as “Dieter Hahn” assumed, but with an undercover investigator of the US police and customs authority ICE. The undercover agent responded to the orders and alerted the Federal Criminal Police Office. There, an officer took over and replied. “Dieter Hahn” had been trapped. The security authorities now tracked his every digital step and seized him at the end of August 2021.
Abdurrahman C., a Hamburg citizen with German-Moroccan roots, is said to hide under the alias “Dieter Hahn”. Yesterday, Thursday, he is sitting in a heavily secured room at the Hamburg Higher Regional Court, his black hoodie pulled deep into his face; a 21-year-old who appears much younger and yet is said to have conceived a devastating terrorist attack.
The Federal Prosecutor’s Office accuses him of having planned a serious crime endangering the state – a terrorist attack similar to the attack on the Boston Marathon in 2013, in which three people died. He is also alleged to have violated the War Weapons Control Act and the Weapons Act.
After the arrest became known, Hamburg’s Senator of the Interior Andy Grote (SPD) said that C. stood for a new generation of jihadists, the “heirs of 9/11”. The allusion is to be understood literally: C.’s father is said to have had close ties to the environment of the 9/11 attackers, the terror cell that prepared the attack in Hamburg 20 years ago.
The son is said to have had a strict religious upbringing, according to the indictment, and to have intensively informed himself about attacks in forums and groups of the messenger service Telegram from 2020 onwards. This also indicates that the accused sympathised with the Islamist ideology of Al-Qaeda: The terrorist attack in the “Hamburg area” – the indictment is not more specific here – was planned around the 20th anniversary of the attacks of 9/11.
At the beginning of 2021, the German-Moroccan first comes to the attention of Hamburg investigators; he visits an Islamist mosque in Harburg. At about the same time, as the investigators later reconstruct it, he begins to order materials for building bombs. First, a kilo of potassium nitrate and a kilo of sulphur, both delivered to his parents’ flat.
Then hundreds of metal screws, several rolls of bell wire (i.e. power lines) and 500 grams of coal powder. He orders some of it to a friend’s address, where he now lives. Investigators also find a massive cooking pot there later. For comparison: The Boston bombers in 2013 had used pressure cookers as bombs and detonated them remotely, filled with black powder, nails and bullets.
The contact with the alleged “arms dealer”, in reality an undercover investigator, is also said to have intensified further. The two Glock pistols had been too expensive for “Dieter Hahn”, as reported by an officer of the Federal Criminal Police Office who testified as a witness on the first day of the trial. The buyer changed his mind and an agreement was reached on a Makarov pistol with 50 rounds for 900 euros, plus a hand grenade costing 110 euros.
The buyer paid ten percent of the price in Bitcoin. The handover of the weapons was supposed to take place at a Mc Donalds car park on Kieler Straße. After the undercover investigator opened the boot and presented the goods, he was trapped. Abdurrahman C. was arrested. He has been in custody since August 2021, most recently in the Prison Hahnöfersand.
The accused initially did not want to comment on the accusations. His defence lawyer filed a motion to exclude the public. This was rejected by the court. In view of the seriousness of the accusations, the public’s interest in information had priority, explained the chairperson of the State Protection Senate, Petra Wende-Spors.
The trial is scheduled until the end of August.