 The 37-year-old imam, identified only as El Beih, had preached sermons in which he called the United States the "true terrorists" and a "Satan" that threatened the Islamic world, state Interior Minister Heribert Rech said. The imam also called for people to be willing to fight and die for Islam, Rech said. "There is no place in our country for people like this, and they must leave Germany as quickly as possible," Rech said. | Pack up your sermons and your seething...and ooze on back to Cairo. |
The imam emigrated to Germany in 2001 and gave the sermons in question in 2003 and 2004 at the Multicultural House in the southern city of Neu-Ulm, Rech said. The Multicultural House has been under observation for years by authorities, who say it is a magnet for Islamic extremists across Germany. Those associated with it have had contacts with top terror suspects in Germany, including Osama bin Laden's suspected finance chief Mamdouh Mahmud Salim, arrested on a U.S. warrant in the area in 1998. Salim, 46, was deported and is in custody in New York awaiting trial on conspiracy charges in the 1998 bombings of two U.S. embassies in East Africa, which killed 224 people. He was sentenced to 32 years in prison last year for stabbing a prison guard in the eye with a sharpened comb. El Beih was supposed to have been deported in early December, but the process was delayed after he filed a plea for asylum. After a court rejected the application, he was taken into custody Friday and flown from Frankfurt to Cairo on Monday, Rech said. |