Irene Mihalic, the Green Party spokeswoman for domestic policy in the German parliament, the Bundestag, herself works as a police officer in North Rhine-Westphalia. She shares the view that there can’t be a “gray area for the use of informants that has been created deliberately.”
One judge in Berlin, Anna Luise Decker, goes even further. In her doctoral thesis, she concluded that the decades-old practice was unconstitutional. “Informants are highly effective, highly dangerous sources of evidence,” Decker wrote. They can infringe on suspects’ privacy without any regulation or effective oversight and aren’t required to show any qualification for the tasks at hand. At the same time, their statements are hardly verifiable by police or the courts, Decker added.
In contrast to undercover cops, informants aren’t public servants and aren’t employed by the state. To that end, most informants “aren’t choir boys,” says Interior Minister Reul. “If you want to fly with the hawks, you can’t be a dove.” Or as Cem puts it: “Who would ever be an informant besides criminals and crazies?”
But Cem was different. There was something special about him that wasn’t common among those in his line of work. He was dependable. One German court even ruled that his years of “intensive and comprehensive gathering of evidence” in the case of Abu Walaa, IS’ “No. 1” man in Germany, had “not shown any indication that any of the evidence provided by VP01 could be incorrect.” In addition, Cem’s police handlers described him as someone who always told the truth and who complied with prior arrangements. They had “no doubt” about Cem’s “personal integrity.”
Protecting Their Source
Cem was a jewel, a stroke of luck for the police because he possessed divergent qualities: He was criminal enough to handle himself well in the scene, yet a decent enough human being to work with the authorities. His police handlers knew this about him and protected him wherever they could — at all costs.
In the files of the Public Prosecutor’s Office in the German city of Bochum, there’s a ruling by a regional court in 2011. The case involved a gang of Kurdish heroin dealers that Cem had exposed after months of undercover work. In order to highlight the informant’s credibility, the verdict included a description of him. It was based on testimony from his police handlers.
The verdict stated that the informant had “minor prior convictions, though he had never been in jail.” The fact that Murat had already been convicted eight times by that point — once for smuggling and selling drugs on a large scale — was something the officers chose not to inform the court about. They also played down the amount of work he had done for the police.
Cem had worked for the police “roughly since mid-1999,” the verdict said, “and had been given up to one assignment per year.” This was far from the truth. At the time, the police had already begun relying on Cem way more than once a year.
It’s possible that the officers didn’t want to give the drug dealers’ lawyers any negative fodder with which to attack their informant. Because even if Cem had done good work, the mere appearance that an informant was untrustworthy could endanger the outcome of a trial.
Cem the Salafist
It wasn’t until 2008 that Cem first came into contact with Islamists, entering the milieu in which his most famous case would play out years later. An acquaintance of his was interested in Islam, Cem says. The man attended lectures by the radical Salafist preachers Pierre Vogel and Sven Lau, who are popular among young people. He asked Cem to accompany him.
Cem wasn’t particularly interested, with his passions lying more with committing crimes, things like selling drugs and weapons, for example. His handlers, though, were extremely interested: Good informants in the scene were extremely uncommon.
So over the period of several months, Cem attended Friday prayers in Mönchengladbach, where Lau played a leading role in a group that went by the name “Invitation to Paradise.” Because he didn’t learn much of consequence, the mission came to a relatively rapid end.
But five years later, Cem’s handlers sent their best informant back into the Islamist scene. In 2013, police in Bochum began Operation Neptune, which had as its primary target Sami A., a Salafist cleric whom the authorities considered to be potentially dangerous. Because of his alleged membership in Osama bin Laden’s garde as the terror mastermind’s “bodyguard,” he had gained a certain degree of notoriety. In Germany, Sami A. was thought to maintain contact with the “Düsseldorf Cell,” a group thought to be close to al-Qaida and which had planned a bomb attack.
Cem was tasked with getting as close to Sami A. as possible, to scout his network and to figure out what exactly his intentions were.
At the time, a significant number of Islamists from Germany had set off for Syria to fight in the civil war there. Security officials were concerned but didn’t know much about the scene. Cem was supposed to change that. But how?
To provide entry into the scene, Cem says his handlers recommended he approach a stand in Bochum that was part of the “Lies!” — or “Read!” — campaign. Islamists used such stands at the time to distribute free copies of the Koran to passersby and to engage them in conversation. But Cem was unable to find the stand.
Ultimately, he headed for a conservative mosque, where he claimed that he wanted to learn more about his own faith. He was immediately welcomed and Cem established friendships and went to Islam seminars. One day, he was invited to a special prayer session. The cleric leading the prayers was Sami A., his target.
Sheikh Sami
These days, there is nothing to indicate that the building in the Langendreer district of Bochum was once one of Germany’s most important meeting sites for Salafists. Out front are two benches and the windows are covered with lace curtains. The windowsills are covered with figurines of porcelain and plastic. In 2018, Sami A. was deported to Tunisia following questionable legal proceedings. His mosque was turned into an apartment.
On a recent morning with the streets calm and the birds chirping, Cem sat down on one of the benches. “Sheikh Sami was radical, but also a nice person,” he says. “The Koran he taught me wasn’t wrong.” Cem still uses the respectful title “sheikh” when speaking of Sami A., even though he spied on the cleric. Cem says the two of them became something like friends.
For his stay in Bochum, Cem exchanged his normal street clothes for the jalabiya, Arab-style robes. He grew a beard and traveled with his new friends from one Salafist gathering to the next. He was older than most of them, which is why they called him “Abi,” which is Turkish for “big brother.”
In front of Sami A., Cem acted the loyal and eager student. They would go to karate training together and to the sauna. And when Sami A. once wanted to leave Bochum, which he wasn’t allowed to do as a rejected asylum-seeker, Cem drove him in his car.
He reported all this to the police, and much more besides. He told them about the exorcist who had come to visit Sami A.’s mosque. He described how Sami would preach to his congregation about virgins and unlimited virility in paradise. One time, says Cem, one of the faithful asked what would happen if he wanted a Ferrari in paradise. “You can have a Ferrari made of gold,” Sami A. responded, according to Cem.
Yet despite the information provided by Cem, the authorities were merely able to learn that Sami A. was an important figure in the Islamist scene. It wasn’t enough to launch criminal proceedings.
Still, Cem had advanced deep into Germany’s Salafist scene and got to know some of the milieu’s most important figures. He met Hasan C. from Duisburg, who showed young men propaganda videos from IS inside his travel agency. And he met Boban S., whose Koran study school in Dortmund became a hotspot for Islamists.
And Cem met Ahmad A., alias Abu Walaa, Islamic State’s man in Germany from the city of Hildesheim. He was known as the “preacher without a face,” because he was meticulous in ensuring that there were no pictures showing him from the front.
Under Abu Walaa, the German-Speaking Islam Circle (DIK) became one of the most radical mosques in the country. Fanatics from all over Germany gathered in the winding rooms on the ground floor of the red-brick corner building that housed it.
Cem became a permanent fixture. “I thought I lived there,” he says today. He would spend the night at the mosque, often without a blanket or pillow, and exercise in the fitness room.
Article source: https://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/germany-s-most-important-informant-tells-his-story-a-07426434-6145-4958-ad5e-3dc689607119#ref=rss