A Natural Leader
The asylum camp in Lebach, Germany, has enough cinder-block apartments to house about 1,500 immigrants. They are mainly North Africans, Turks and Palestinians. Most stay a few months as they wait for German authorities to decide whether they can remain in the country for the long term.
On Sept. 13, 2000, a man calling himself Mohamed Abdul Hadi Fayad arrived at the camp after spending a year in jail and quickly assumed a leadership role among the residents. He presented their grievances to camp authorities. He spoke Arabic, English and Spanish, which made him useful as an interpreter. He also put together a makeshift mosque and led prayers during Ramadan.
Italian police display photographs of Rabei Osman Sayed Ahmed, left, also known as "Mohamed the Egyptian," or Mohamed Fayad, and another unidentified man.
(Stefano Rellandini -- Reuters)
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"He called himself 'the Imam,' " recalled Barbara Paulus, a case worker at the camp in Lebach, a town of about 22,000 near the regional capital of Saarbruecken. "We didn't have any problems with him. The others respected him. He reported their problems and talked to us on their behalf."
Fayad was an anonymous foreigner who had been arrested a year earlier on his way to Paris. Soon after the arrest, he requested asylum. Though he had no papers, he identified himself as a stateless Palestinian who had been living in Lebanon. He said he arrived in Europe in April 1999 on a flight to Frankfurt and had been staying with a friend there.
The German government usually grants asylum as a matter of policy to Palestinians, but officials were unable to verify Fayad's story. Lebanese and Palestinian authorities said they could not confirm his identity and suspected he might be North African, according to a German law enforcement official involved in the case.
Immigration officials denied Fayad's asylum request. But Germany could not deport him because officials didn't know where to send him. That situation is common in Germany, where about one in 20 asylum seekers is unable to verify their claimed nationality.
With his case in limbo, Fayad remained at the Lebach camp for almost a year. Residents are forbidden from leaving the local area, but they are not confined or closely monitored. As a practical matter, camp officials say, there is little they can do to make sure people stay.
So it didn't strike anyone as unusual when Fayad vanished. He was last seen in the camp on Aug. 29, 2001, when he came to the main office to pick up his twice-weekly food rations. Three weeks later, immigration officials notified the Lebach town hall that Fayad was no longer a resident and crossed his name off their case list.
"Each month, a lot of people disappear here," said Paulus, the case worker. "I don't know how they do it, but each month we have to close a lot of files."
Always on the Move
Investigators have since established that the man had left the camp before, traveling across Europe under a variety of identities and passports.
In January 2001, he was seen with Islamic radicals in Madrid, police reported. Six months later, he applied for a residency permit in the Spanish capital under the name Rabei Osman el Sayed Ahmed, producing an Egyptian passport as proof of identity, according to a German law enforcement official involved in the case.
On Sept. 6, 2001, a few days after he left Germany for good, he visited the Egyptian Embassy in Madrid and applied for a duplicate passport, saying he had lost his old one, the official said. That is a common trick in producing false identity documents -- the old passport is altered and given to someone else.
Soon after the visit, Ahmed attracted renewed attention in Germany and Spain, but for different reasons.
In the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, German authorities investigated thousands of fundamentalist Muslims in the country to determine if any had ties to the Hamburg cell that planned the hijackings.
