GERMAN police questioning “Fritz the Taliban”, a 28-year-old Munich-born terror suspect, revealed yesterday that they are hunting up to 49 Islamist plotters over a conspiracy to use truck bombs to blow up air-ports, bars and discos.

The arrest of Fritz Gelowicz as one of the plot’s alleged ringleaders has shocked Germans. It emerged this weekend that he was raised in a middle-class family in largely Roman Catholic Bavaria before converting to Islam at the age of 18 and changing his name to Abdullah following the break-up of his parents’ marriage.

“Fritzi” was remembered by neighbours as a “little blond boy” from a “popular family”. His mother was a doctor and his father an engineer.

Gelowicz was drawn to a radical Islamic “multicultural” centre in Neu-Ulm, where he is believed to have met Mohammed Atta, one of the 9/11 hijackers. He attended a Taliban training camp on Afghanistan’s border with Pakistan in March 2006, returning to Germany to study engineering.

The net finally started closing when he was seen spying on a US military base in Hanau, east of Frankfurt, last New Year’s Eve. The police raided his house just days before his wedding to a German-born Turk, although he was not charged at the time.

Yesterday Germany’s federal police revealed that the network of suspects across the globe had widened substantially, while officers were still focusing on a “hard core” of seven to 10 individuals. Two of these are believed to be under surveillance in Germany, while others are on the run in Germany and the Middle East.

Scotland Yard and MI5 were informed of the plot, which was aimed at targets frequented by US citizens, in July because of close parallels with British terror cases.

August Hanning, Germany’s deputy interior minister, said that they had been liaising with London after “big parallels” had emerged with a failed plot to blow up British aircraft last summer. Hydrogen peroxide was said to have been the intended explosive in both cases.

Security sources believe the plotters were given a “clear task” while attending terrorist training camps in Pakistan.

The suspects have been linked to the Islamic Jihad Union, an extremist group that broke off from the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, an Al-Qaeda ally, in 2002.

The German investigation was boosted by an American intelligence intercept last year that detected suspicious communications between Pakistan and Stuttgart. “This group did not act alone. There is a network,” said Hanning.

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