The prime suspect in the alleged German terror plot to blow up hundreds of people may have had contact with Mohammed Atta, the suicide pilot who smashed a hijacked plane into the Twin Towers.

German police reports are vague about the encounter, but it has helped investigators to trace Fritz Gelowicz’s path from average Bavarian schoolboy to Islamic radical. His case has also highlighted the curious and sinister role of Neu-Ulm — a small township in the Roman Catholic heart of southern Germany — as a cradle of Islamic extremism.

The connection between Gelowicz, 28, who was arrested this week, and Atta seems to date back to 2000 while the suicide pilot was studying in Hamburg and already preparing the 9/11 attack with a group of devout accomplices.

The Egyptian student visited a small mosque in Bavarian Neu-Ulm, which had already gained a reputation for radicalism. Firebrand preachers were passing in and out of the town and it had become a magnet for angry young Muslims.

“Fritz G came to our notice nine years ago when he publicly praised Islamic terror attacks,” said Guenther Beckstein, the Interior Minister of Bavaria.” His name crops up again in relation to a visit to Neu-Ulm by Mohammed Atta, who later went on to be a terror pilot on September 11.”

When the Gelowicz family moved to Neu-Ulm in 1983 it was a relatively prosperous community just across the Danube river from Ulm with its grand, towering cathedral. An American garrison was based there, with big-spending soldiers.

But when the US decided to station Pershing missiles near by the town became a hub of protest: the fledgling Green protest movement stirred up passions against Pershing and Cruise missiles and the national mood swung against America.

“Those were stormy times,” recalls Frank Dreesen who studied in Ulm in the 1980s. “They left behind an anti-American imprint on a whole generation. And then when the Americans left and took their missiles with them, Neu-Ulm suddenly became much poorer — and even more resentful.”

Fritz Gelowicz’s parents were not particularly political — his father was an engineer, his mother a doctor — but at his school, America had become Enemy No 1.

As a teenager Fritz Gelowicz befriended some Turks. The industry around Ulm and Neu-Ulm, machine-tool factories, chemicals, had created jobs for Turkish families. Under their influence, and damaged by the divorce of his parents, he withdrew to his room and started to read the Koran. The Multi-Kulti Haus became his second home.

At the age of 18, he converted to Islam and insisted on being called Abdullah. He enrolled as an engineering student at the local University of Applied Sciences and to earn some money on the side helped his father at his Solar energy company.

Working alongside him was another German convert to Islam, Tolga D.

Tolga D was arrested last June in Pakistan on his way to a training camp with thousands of euros in his pocket. Since then he has been held in a German prison, under investigation for racist and terrorist-related crimes.

“It was 9/11 and specifically Mohammed Atta’s involvement that seems to have inspired many of the people who came in and out of the Neu-Ulm mosque,” says a senior investigator. “He was their inspiration, just like them in so many ways — highly educated, disgusted with society and very devout.”

About 30 German converts are at the hub of the Neu-Ulm Muslim community. Several went to Pakistan. Yet all of this has happened without the Bavarian Neu-Ulmers really noticing: the church bells ring out as usual and the kebab stores are regarded as a normal part of the urban landscape.

For the past nine months, since returning from a training camp in Pakistan, Fritz Gelowicz allegedly gathered 750kg of hydrogen peroxide to make several truck bombs that would be directed at American air bases or clubs and pubs frequented by Americans. But during that same period he also went through a number of rituals as if preparing himself for death, or at least for a dramatic change.

In January, soon after being spotted spying on a US base in Hanau, he married a German-Turkish woman according to the strict rules of Islam; the bride wore a burka. A few days ago he mystified his parents by visiting them both and bidding them farewell.

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