Frankfurt, Nov 14: German police launched a series of nationwide raids yesterday in a hunt for Islamic militants suspected of being in contact with the Hamburg cell linked to the September 11 attacks, prosecutors said.

Police raided 27 homes where Palestinians from Israel, the occupied territories and Jordan were living and questioned 25 people, Frankfurt senior prosecutor Job Tilmann said in a statement.
Documents, computer files and a quantity of unidentified chemicals were seized in the raids, which took place in the states of Hesse, North Rhine-Westphalia, Berlin, Hamburg and Rhineland-Palatinate, Tilmann said.
One person was arrested on unrelated charges.
Tilmann said the Palestinians belonged to a group called "Hizb ut-Tahrir", which wants Islamic countries to unite into a single state, but that no concrete evidence linking them to any suspicious activities had been found.



Several such raids have been launched in Germany since the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States.



Three of the suicide hijackers used the Northern city of Hamburg as a base, which threw a spotlight on failures in German intelligence.



Last week, the intelligence chief warned that Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda network could be preparing to launch a major attack soon, possibly in Germany or France.


Bureau Report