An airport employee questioned by German police in connection with the terrorist attacks in the United States has been released without being charged, a spokeswoman for the federal prosecutor's office said Friday.
Police detained the man Thursday when they found him in the apartment of a Moroccan who had lived in the northern German port city of Hamburg with two key suspects in the US suicide assaults.
German federal prosecutors said Thursday that three Arab men who had lived in Hamburg had been aboard hijacked flights that crashed into the World Trade Center and in western Pennsylvania and were suspected in the planning of history's worst terrorist attack on US soil.
One other man had reportedly been arrested in a Hamburg police sweep Thursday based on FBI information that some of the suspected planners of the catastrophic attacks had lived here. But the spokeswoman said the report of the arrest had been false.
A woman from the United Arab Emirates was questioned Thursday and released. Police said she had not been a suspect but had had contact with people in apartments thought to have been used by the suspects.
Citing sources close to the investigation, Germany's DPA news agency reported that FBI agents were expected in Hamburg Friday to meet with German investigators. Authorities declined to comment on the report.
Based on information provided by the FBI, German authorities investigated at least 12 apartments since Wednesday with links to the suspects and searched several of them.
The head of the German federal prosecutors office, Kay Nehm, said Thursday he believed the suspects were believed to have been part of a terrorist cell in Hamburg with "fundamentalist Islamic beliefs" aimed at cooperating with foreign terrorist networks in "destroying symbolically important buildings in a spectacular fashion".
Hamburg authorities Olaf Scholz identified two of the primary suspects as Mohamed Atta, 33, who was registered on American Airlines Flight 11, and Marwan Al-Shehhi, 23, who was on the passenger list of United Airlines Flight 175.
Flight 11 was steered to crash into the one of the twin towers at the World Trade Center minutes before flight 175 dove into the second tower. Two other hijacked planes crashed into the Pentagon and in western Pennsylvania several minutes later -- KARLSRUHE, Germany (AFP)
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