NEU-ULM, GERMANY — In the final days, the Turkish Muslim and the two German converts are said to have schemed and ranted like men on the verge of exploding.
During clandestine meetings, including ones at the mountain village hide-out where they allegedly began assembling bombs, Adem Yilmaz, Fritz Gelowicz and Daniel Schneider talked nearly nonstop about potential bombing targets and suicide attack scenarios, German law enforcement officials say. A small army of police listened in through wiretaps, poised to swoop in as the talk got uglier, according to the officials, who asked to remain anonymous because they were not authorized to discuss the case publicly.
"They were basically throwing out ideas, what about this target, what about that one," said one investigator.
"They became almost megalomaniacal," said another.
The trio's arrest this week for allegedly plotting car bomb attacks on Americans in Germany ended an odyssey into fanaticism, officials say. The journey, they say, led from the radical Islamic underworld of gray German towns to fundamentalist Koranic schools in the Middle East to a Turkish-Central Asian nexus in Pakistani training camps aligned with Al Qaeda.
The alleged leader of the militant cell, the wavy-haired Gelowicz, 28, is married to a woman of Turkish descent who wears a burka. He and a dozen other suspects who remain free, mostly Turks or converts radicalized in Turkish circles, allegedly belonged to the Islamic Jihad Union, or IJU, an Uzbek-dominated terrorist group that is said to have directed their activities from Pakistan.
The alleged connection stokes fears of a growth of radicalism in Germany's large Turkish immigrant population.
Germany has approximately 2 million residents of Turkish descent, a community long seen as hard-working and religiously moderate. The Turkish government has tried to keep fundamentalism in check among Turkish immigrants by training imams to serve in diaspora mosques. Far fewer Turks have been involved in terrorism cases in Germany and elsewhere than Arabs from the Middle East of North Africa.
But the alleged plot to commit Europe's bloodiest attacks reflects the kind of extremism that afflicts South Asian communities in Britain and North African groups in France. Experts are concerned about Germany becoming an enticing target for Al Qaeda's efforts to recruit European-based extremists to strike the West.
