Com­ment: The recent­ly-report­ed Mum­bai-style attacks are linked to the milieu of 9/11. Not only are some of the same per­son­nel appar­ent­ly involved, but the plot­ters attend­ed the Mosque in Munich favored by Mohamed Atta and the oth­er 9/11 attack­ers.

“More Ties Between al Qae­da Plot­ter and 9/11 Ham­burg Cell Revealed” by Thomas Joce­lyn; The Long War Jour­nal; 10/2/2010.

Excerpt: The man at the heart of the plot to launch Mum­bai-style attacks in Europe has ties to at least four mem­bers of al Qaeda’s infa­mous Ham­burg ter­ror­ist cell.

Ahmad Sid­diqui, who was cap­tured in Afghanistan in July, has told his inter­roga­tors that he met with Said Baha­ji after join­ing al Qaeda’s ranks in Pak­istan, Der Spiegel report­ed on Sat­ur­day. Sid­diqui also told inter­roga­tors that Osama bin Laden had ordered and financed the Mum­bai-like ter­ror plot in Europe.

Baha­ji is want­ed by West­ern author­i­ties for his involve­ment in the 9/11 plot and has been on the lam for years. In Octo­ber 2009, CNN report­ed that the Pak­istani mil­i­tary had recov­ered a pass­port bear­ing Baha­ji’s name and pho­to after tak­ing con­trol of a ter­ror camp in the vil­lage of Sher­wan­gi in South Waziris­tan. The pass­port con­tained a Pak­istani visa show­ing that Baha­ji “entered Pak­istan on Sep­tem­ber 4, 2001.” Some mem­bers of the Ham­burg cell fled Ger­many short­ly before the 9/11 attacks in order to avoid arrest after the fact.

Today, Baha­ji is both a senior pro­pa­gan­dist with­in al Qae­da and also involved in the orga­ni­za­tion’s oper­a­tions.

Accord­ing to the 9/11 Com­mis­sion, Baha­ji and anoth­er mem­ber of the Ham­burg cell, Mounir el Motas­sad­eq, assist­ed the “core Ham­burg cell mem­bers” by han­dling “their affairs” while they were in Afghanistan “so that their trip could be kept secret.” The core mem­bers includ­ed the sui­cide hijack pilots and Ramzi Binal­shibh, who act­ed as an inter­me­di­ary between the hijack­ers and al Qaeda’s senior lead­er­ship in Afghanistan.

Baha­ji was also the Inter­net guru for the Ham­burg cell. An inves­ti­ga­tion of Baha­ji’s lap­top, which was con­fis­cat­ed by Ger­man author­i­ties after the 9/11 attacks, showed that the hijack­ers used it to con­duct research. . . .

. . . In addi­tion to Baha­ji and Motas­sad­eq, Sid­diqui report­ed­ly has ties to two oth­er Ham­burg cell mem­bers. NPR report­ed ear­li­er this week that Sid­diqui “alleged­ly knew Mohamed Atta,” the lead hijack­er for the 9/11 oper­a­tion. This is cer­tain­ly more than coin­ci­dence. Said Baha­ji, whom Sid­diqui met in Pak­istan, attend­ed to Atta’s affairs while he was in Afghanistan. The 9/11 Com­mis­sion found that Baha­ji took care of Atta’s and Binal­shib­h’s “rou­tine matters...thereby help­ing them remain abroad with­out draw­ing atten­tion to their absence.”

Sid­diqui attend­ed the same mosque as the Ham­burg cell. In August of this year, the Tai­ba mosque, which was for­mer­ly known as the Al Quds mosque, was closed down just weeks after Sid­diqui was detained in Afghanistan. The imam of the Tai­ba mosque was a Syr­i­an-Ger­man named Mamoun Dark­azan­li, who is a long­time al Qae­da oper­a­tive and was close­ly affil­i­at­ed with the Ham­burg cell. [See LWJ report, Long­time al Qae­da oper­a­tive runs mosque closed by Ger­man author­i­ties.] . . .