How terror groups vied for a player

But on the 20th day of his military training, Abdallah says, he was injured. After a short hospital stay, he moved to bin Laden's compound near the Kandahar airport. While there, he says he met bin Laden himself and was invited to join Al Qaeda. However, he opted first to pursue his religious education and entered an Islamic institute in Kandahar. There, he befriended two other young men and eventually traveled with them to Afghanistan's capital, Kabul, to meet with Zarqawi.

Abdallah says Zarqawi asked him to return to his home in Jordan to help execute terrorist attacks there. Abdallah declined, but said he would return to Germany and help Zarqawi carry out attacks on Jews who lived in Germany. "An attack in Germany would have made Al Tawhid very famous," Abdallah says in the documents. "It would have sent the same [message] as the attacks of Al Qaeda on Sept. 11, namely that our organization is as active in other parts of the world."

In August 2001, Abdallah returned to Germany, where he says he contacted Zarqawi's man in charge of running German cells, referred to in the interrogation documents as Abu Ali. Ali provided Abdallah with money to live on and later found him a job at a service station in Germany.

At this point, Abdallah says in the transcript that three people made up the support cell: Ali, Abdallah, and another recruit. Their tasks were to obtain illegal passports, which in telephone conversations they referred to in code as "Moroccan cars" or "Spanish women"; create illegal cellphone contracts; raise funds; and work out details for any attacks they were ordered to execute.

Ali, as the man alleged in the transcript to be in charge of German cells, was in direct contact with Zarqawi, and he was also in touch with the leaders of other cells living in Germany.

Abdallah names the cell leaders in Munich, Hamburg, Berlin, Nuremberg, and Wiesbaden. He also names the heads of cells for Britain, Denmark, and the Czech Republic.

Ali, according to Abdallah, traveled monthly to these other German cities to collect payments from the local support cell leaders. The money allegedly came from private donors as well as collections in mosques. Abdallah says Ali returned from these trips with sums ranging from $3,500 to $40,000. Ali transferred this money to Zarqawi, who was by then living in Iran.

According to the transcripts, Ali told Abdallah the money was going to either Al Qaeda or Al Tawhid. But Abdallah also recalls a tiff over the money. One of the most important cell leaders, or money collectors, according to Abdallah, was a man named "Thaer" who lived in Munich. He asked that the money be split: 50 percent to Al Qaeda, 25 percent to Al Tawhid, and 25 percent to the Taliban. Abdallah says that Zarqawi, however, would not agree with this split.

Abdallah says that because Ali suspected German authorities were watching him, Zarqawi replaced him at the beginning of 2002. The new man, referred to in the papers as "Aschraf," was from then on in charge of the cell that included Abdallah. Aschraf's assignment was to carry out "two or three" attacks against "Jewish institutions" in Germany. Zarqawi, Abdallah says, gave the orders for the kinds of attacks, in this case, suicide bomb attacks.

But the details had to be worked out locally. Aschraf directed Abdallah to phone members of other cells to inquire about explosives, which they referred to as "black pills" and "Lebanese or Russian apples," the transcript says. Abdallah claims he purchased explosives from "Albanians in Hamburg."

But the plans were thwarted with his arrest. According to intelligence officials, though, Zarqawi and his various cells have carried out several additional attacks, including the April 2002 bombing of a synagogue on the Tunisian island of Djerba, in which 19 people, including 14 German tourists, were killed.

Abdallah is currently serving a four-year prison term in Germany. He was given a relatively mild sentence at his trial, German authorities say, because he had provided evidence of the inner workings of Al Qaeda. He has been a witness in the two trials in Hamburg linked to the Sept. 11 attacks in the US and is expected to testify in other upcoming cases.

According to published accounts, the presiding judge at Abdallah's trial, Ottmar Briedling, said he was convinced of the "credibility of the bulk of the information" the Islamic militant provided. German authorities have acknowledged that Abdallah will require witness protection for the rest of his life.

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