UK link to terrorists planning new 9/11 massacre

They planned to strike at German airports and US bases exactly six years after hijacked planes ploughed into the World Trade Centre.

The three suspects, two German converts to Islam and a Turk who had undergone military training at Taliban camps in Pakistan, were caught with 750kg of hydrogen peroxide, a chemical easily transformed into explosives.

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Several calls to British numbers are said to been made from mobile telephones linked to two of the men being questioned in Germany. One is said to have been a "known" number.

Prosecutors and police painted a picture of a ruthless cell of Al-Qaeda-linked fanatics, willing to die in suicide attacks with bombs more powerful than those used in the July 7 attacks in London in 2005.

Prosecutors said the attacks were planned at Frankfurt airport, Germany's biggest and busiest, and the Ramstein Airbase - the Pentagon's largest outside of the US.

Other US bases, civilian airports, a nightclub and pub were on the terrorists' target list.

Germany's chief prosecutor, Monika Harms, said the plan was to construct massive car bombs and cause "as much loss of life as possible".

"We have stopped what would certainly have been the worst terror attacks in Germany," he added.

The men had been under surveillance for months from agents of the BND, Germany' s MI5, and the elite GSG-9 police commandos who are trained along SAS-lines.

American intelligence officials were also in on the surveillance but played no part in the arrests.

On Tuesday, authorities swooped at a hideout in the village of Oberschledorn in North Rhine-Westphalia where the "bomb factory" was located.

One of the suspects broke out of a bathroom window and bolted into woodland, where he wrestled with a police officer and managed to take his gun.

A shot was fired but no one was hit. The policeman and his colleagues overpowered the suspect. All three suspects were arrested.

Forty other homes and offices across Germany were raided at the same time. As well as the chemical mixtures, police discovered military detonators.

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German defence minister Franz Josef Jung said: "The attacks were planned for the near future. They presented a direct threat to life."

The group had been under surveillance ever since one was spotted spying the US barracks at Hanau on New Year's Eve last year.

Email traffic between them and others abroad led to the authorities' action five days before the anniversary of 9/11.

Der Spiegel, the respected German news magazine, was among media outlets which reported the terrorists were gearing up for attacks on that day.

Last night British anti-terror officers were last night checking for links between the men held in Germany and British-Pakistani terror suspects who may have trained with them.

Officers from Scotland Yard flew to Germany to assist the investigation. They want to examine any possible links with UK terror plots.

The details of the men are also to be shown to Al Qaeda supergrass Mohammad Babar, who trained with Britons at terror camps, by US officials and to extremists in British jails.

Al Qaeda and jihadi bomb makers are known to have taught Britons how to use hydrogen peroxide at camps in Pakistan attended by other Europeans.

It has featured as a key component of al Qaeda-linked bombers at least twice in Britain. It was used by the four July 7 suicide bombers in the bombs that killed 52 on the London transport network.

It was also to have been used two weeks later in the copycat attacks by four more Islamic fundamentalists intent on bringing slaughter to the capital's streets. But the rucksack bombs failed to go off.

The plotters were jailed earlier this year. Germany routinely does not issue the last names of criminal suspects.

A man identified as being the group's leader, Fritz G, 28, is from Ulm in southern Germany, where he is understood to have worked at the city's Islamic Information Centre after converting to Islam.

The other German, Daniel S, 22, is also a Muslim convert and comes from Saarbruecken on the border with France. The third man is a Turk named Adem Y, 29, who lives in Frankfurt.

They were members of a group called Islamic Jihad Union. Spawned in Uzbekistan, it was described by a senior German lawman as a "franchise" of al Qaeda with close ties to Osama Bin Laden's terror corporation.

The men, radicalised over what they saw as the oppression of Muslims worldwide by America and her allies, have apparently been confessing to interrogators.