MUNICH, April 15, 2005 (IslamOnline.net & News Agencies) – German police raided on Thursday, April 14, several mosques, homes and offices in a number of cities, in a new crackdown on alleged terrorism financiers in the European country.

Seven people, including two accused of raising funds for extremist groups, were arrested during the operation, which took place in Munich, Berlin, Bremen and Hamburg as well as the states of Lower Saxony and Baden-Wurttemberg.

“We looked at the homes and offices of anyone who had any sort of contact to these two suspects,” said a spokeswoman for Munich police said.

She maintained that twelve premises, including two mosques, were raided in Munich alone.

Police said more than €50,000 (64,000 US dollars) in cash and about 60 computers, CDs and video cassettes were seized during the swoop operation.

Belgian police also cracked down two premises in Brussels in related raids but made no arrests.

German police said among the arrested are 47-year-old Egyptian Abdel-Raouf R., and 43-year-old Tunisian Abdellatif T, reported Agence France-Presse (AFP).

The two are accused of money laundering and tax evasion.

Police further claimed that the two, both living legally in Germany since the early 1990s, had each transferred up to €500,000 to alleged extremist groups abroad.

“Each of them had raised about half a million euros, and we can't rule out that it was even more,” said a Munich police official.

German police said the Egyptian had ties with some of the plane hijackers in the 9/11 attacks.

Jörg Beyser, head of the Munich police's state protection department, said investigators believed the Tunisian had transferred money to families of imprisoned members of the banned Muslim Brotherhood in Tunisia.

Police did not say what the other five men were accused of.

Since the 9/11 attacks, Germany has been cracking down hard on what it calls “extremist Islamists” accused of posing a threat to the country’s national security.

“We'll step up the pressure on Islamist extremists even more and use every possible provision of immigration law to deport as fast as possible those who threaten us or preach hatred,” said the Bavarian interior minister, Guenther Beckstein.

The new German immigration law, which went into effect with the beginning of the year, specifically includes a provision to expel foreigners posing a threat to national security.

The law also makes it easier to expel leaders of banned organizations, alleged terrorist sympathizers and persons deemed to be preaching hate.

Days after the law went into effect, German states rushed to prepare lists of thousands of Muslim immigrants -- whom the German authorities dubbed as suspects -- for immediate deportation.

Islam comes third after Protestant and Catholic Christianity. There are some 3.4 million Muslims in Germany, including 220,000 in Berlin alone.