Germany arrests ‘wife’ of alleged terror cell chief
By DPA, IANSTuesday, February 23, 2010
KARLSRUHE - German police have arrested the reported wife of Fritz Gelowicz, the self-confessed chief of an Islamist terrorist cell, accusing her of fund-raising for her husband’s Al Qaeda associates.
Gelowicz, 30, a German convert to Islam, is currently on trial for plotting car-bomb attacks inside Germany. Police arrested his alleged three-man cell in 2007 before it could begin assembling its bombs.
Police said only that they had picked up a woman, 28, on Saturday in the southern city of Ulm and two men on charges of being supporters of the Islamic Jihad Union (IJU) terrorist organisation.
But German television channels said the woman was Gelowicz’ wife. Asked for comment, prosecution officials would neither confirm nor deny the connection, saying privacy law prevented them doing so.
Lawyers have portrayed Gelowicz as a turncoat to the IJU, saying he has given German police a detailed account of IJU operations.
That makes the allegation that his wife is still connected to the IJU all the more surprising. The IJU has training camps in Waziristan, a mountainous region of northwest Pakistan.
The woman and a man, 20, have been remanded in custody while the third person arrested, a man, 31, was granted bail. Federal prosecutors in Karlsruhe said they were likely to face charges of assisting a foreign terrorist organisation.
All three are German nationals of foreign extraction.
The 20-year-old man and the woman from Ulm had allegedly collected 2,400 euros ($3,620) since October and sent it to the IJU via an intermediary in Turkey. The Berlin man made a remittance of 1,400 euros.
A prosecution spokesman said police pulled the Berlin man off a Vienna-bound train a week ago to prevent him leaving German territory after his passport had been confiscated.
German authorities suspected he wanted to go to Afghanistan to train in terrorism, the news magazine Der Spiegel said.
The ex-IJU men on trial in Dusseldorf say the group is not controlled by al Qaeda but is on friendly terms with it.
