How Hezbollah built a secret network across northern Germany

The National’s investigation shows hidden grip on mosques, scout groups and cultural centres

The Blue Mosque in the city of Hamburg was shut down last year over allegations it supported Hezbollah and acted as an Iranian outpost in Germany. Getty Images

Hezbollah is using a secret foothold stretched across northern Germany to spread its influence as it provides a European base for fund-raising and acquiring arms equipment, The National can reveal.

The underground chain has infiltrated mosques, youth and scout groups, is aided by a string of propaganda outlets and has more than 1,200 supporters in the country. From the start, it was closely supervised by Hassan Nasrallah, the group's former leader who was assassinated in September.

Based on interviews, unpublished court papers, intelligence documents, official correspondence and online posts, The National has pieced together how it has played a cat-and-mouse game with the German authorities. Our investigation shows how supporters are resisting a months-long intelligence crackdown accelerated by the Gaza war.

Two Fadels

A scrap of paper found in a bathroom bin gave investigators a key breakthrough. It helped agents prove the bathroom's user, named as Hassan M by German prosecutors, but who used the name Sheikh Hassan Murthada, was at the heart of the network. It showed he reported directly to the Iran-backed leadership in Lebanon while travelling around Germany overseeing Lebanese associations and drumming up support for Hezbollah. He was jailed last year.

When police swooped on a suspected Hezbollah operative near Hannover in December, known as Fadel R, his correspondence had already been exposed at Hassan M's trial. In a communication to Mr Nasrallah, who was killed in his bunker weeks earlier, Fadel R had complained about payments related to the renovation of a mosque.

Fadel R has yet to face trial on allegations of belonging to a terrorist group. Prosecutors are to allege that he was a trained Hezbollah operative who arranged for a pipeline of Shiite Muslim clerics to preach in the community's mosque and Islamic centres.

His arrest came months after the detention last July of another suspect, Fadel Z, who allegedly acquired drone parts in Germany for use against Israel. It linked the anti-Hezbollah crackdown directly to the war in the Middle East.

The arrests of the suspects marked a key breakthrough for efforts to crack a group that intelligence reports had tracked but largely failed to contain for years. Politicians who campaigned for the crackdown were delighted. “To be able to ban something, you have to be able to prove everything,” said Sina Imhof, a Hamburg politician who deals directly with the city’s intelligence services. “It’s not as easy as you would imagine, because of course they’re not stupid.”

Things began to change for Hezbollah after war erupted between Israel, Hamas and Hezbollah in 2023. Hourvash Pourkian, an Iranian living in Hamburg, believes events in the Middle East were what pushed authorities into action. “I think it had an effect,” she said. “Because why didn’t they do it before?”

She recalled a breakfast with Hamburg’s interior minister, where she asked him if “1,200 people have to die before [Germany's Interior Minister] will even stage a raid”, referring to the October 7 attack on Israel.

Hassan M had his contacts all over Hezbollah’s north German corridor. Described in court papers as a “travelling sheikh”, he took an “orientation tour” around Germany in 2016 followed by similar tours in 2018 and 2023.

He railed against the incompetence of organisers in Bremen in supporting figures who were linked to Amal, a rival of Hezbollah in Lebanon. He organised “training workshops” when he found that not all was well at an Imam Al Hussein cultural society in Osnabruck. There was a visit to the small town of Bad Oeynhausen, where security services have been watching an Al Mahdi cultural society with suspected links to Hezbollah. Flight data put Hassan M on planes between Beirut and Berlin every year between 2018 and 2022.

Written reports on his trips were found on a laptop. So were two CVs with a Hezbollah logo in the top right-hand corner, in which Hassan M described working for the group and the Imam Al Mahdi Scouts since 1992. Found in his contacts were the numbers of the Hamburg mosque leaders, including Seyed Mousavifar and his former boss Mohammad Hadi Mofatteh, as well as members of Hezbollah’s foreign relations department. The scrap of paper in his bathroom bin placed him at the Hamburg mosque for a conference of religious scholars from Germany and the Netherlands.

Hassan M was jailed for five and a half years. The cache of documents also incriminated a scout leader, Abdul in the city of Bremen who was sentenced to three years in prison. They were the first convictions for Hezbollah activity in Germany.

Scout troop

The youth group in Bremen modelled on Hezbollah’s Imam Al Mahdi Scouts was another vehicle for the Hezbollah presence. Based at Al Mustafa Society, an Islamic centre, the troop is known as Al Mustafa Scouts. The red, green and yellow on their uniforms was the giveaway that a secret allegiance lay behind their parades, Arabic lessons and visits to old people’s homes.

The scouts were even featured in a report on Hezbollah-operated TV station Al Manar. Aly Berro, a reporter with the Lebanese-based outfit, told viewers that Ashura commemorations featuring the Bremen scouts had been prepared for days, so that their religious message “may be passed on to the generations”.

When police raided the secluded two-storey building that had hosted the Shiite devotion, they found material on a laptop from Hezbollah’s own youth group, the Imam Al Mahdi Scouts, in which they wore almost identical uniforms. Activities at Al Mustafa Society also included Friday night readings of the works of Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Nonetheless, the city of Bremen admitted in correspondence last year that it doesn’t know whether any children were radicalised at Al Mustafa Society and so have not passed any intelligence to social services. “Assessments in that direction continue,” it said.

Meanwhile, in December 2024, a new edict went out to network providers not to let Al Manar content be shown to German children in either Arabic or English. A commissioner for children and the media, Marc Jan Eumann, said Al Manar’s “propaganda is not permitted in Germany”.

Influence operations

Hassan M had a roving role overseeing Lebanese associations that acted as a network in the absence of any nationwide structure for the estimated 1,250 Hezbollah sympathisers in Germany. His personal paperwork included a nine-page report on his activities in 2016, in which he described talks on concealing funds for the Hannover mosque renovation from the German taxman.

According to Hassan M, a solution was offered by Reza Ramezani, who ran the Islamic Centre of Hamburg (IZH) until he left Germany for Iran in 2018. He proposed a scheme by which the fund-raisers could turn to the Hamburg mosque to operate “beyond the German state”.

Reza Ramezani, left, was head of the Islamic Centre of Hamburg until 2018 when he handed over to Mohammad Hadi Mofatteh, right. Both men have now left Germany. Getty Images

“Hezbollah for many years has invested in having support networks around the world,” said Matthew Levitt, a former FBI counter-terrorism analyst and author of a book on Hezbollah’s global footprint. “These networks do a variety of different things, including raising funds, sometimes through charity for the organisation, sometimes through illicit financial conduct. They also recruit people, and there are cases in the past few years of Hezbollah actually recruiting people in Germany.”

Blue Mosque

Hassan M was closely tied to an alleged Iranian outpost in Hamburg called the Blue Mosque that intelligence services had monitored since the 1990s. The ornate mosque is still pointed out by sightseeing buses as they drive along a lakeside road dotted with gated houses. Inside, intelligence officials allege the mosque was used as an outpost of the Iranian regime to spread propaganda and support Hezbollah’s activities.

On what was supposedly an open day for mosques across Hamburg, IZH representatives were less than welcoming, stationing themselves “a couple of hundred metres away handing out biscuits and tea”, recalled Ms Pourkian, who has campaigned for the centre’s closure. “We were right in front of the mosque, and they weren’t.”

At another stage she was told by a Hamburg deputy mayor that the mosque had evaded an order to stop arranging buses to Berlin for Quds Day, an annual pro-Palestine and anti-Israel demonstration backed by Iran. The bus stops were apparently moved “a couple of streets away”.

Hourvash Pourkian, an Iranian living in Hamburg, wants the city's Blue Mosque to remain shut for as long as Iran's regime remains in power. The National

In 2022, the mosque’s deputy head Seyed Mousavifar was deported to Iran because of alleged links to Hezbollah, which has been fully banned in Germany since 2020. Security services went public with their accusations, tying him to a charity called Humans for Humans that was banned in 2021 for being a Hezbollah front organisation. “It was discovered that many people from Hezbollah were coming in and out [of the mosque] and that the deputy head was supporting them,” Ms Pourkian said.

The mosque did not take the allegations lying down. It sued the Hamburg intelligence chiefs who had described it as an Iranian outpost, forcing investigators to lay their evidence on the table and potentially risk exposing sources. “I think that was also a reason why security services then thought, ‘that’s out there now, let’s wait a bit before we issue a ban and then a court tells us that it's not possible’”, Ms Imhof said. In court the spies failed to back up their claim that 50 Hezbollah supporters frequented Friday prayers in Hamburg. The mosque managed to get several other passages struck out of declassified reports.

The breaking point was reached last July, when the German Interior Minister, Nancy Faeser, banned the Islamic Centre of Hamburg and the Blue Mosque’s gates were closed. Police searched 53 properties around Germany, including in Bremen and Lower Saxony, as they followed the trail to possible affiliates.

The Islamic Centre of Hamburg, which operated from the Blue Mosque, is taking the German government to court over a ban issued last year. Getty Images

The worshippers locked out of the mosque say they are victims of a political stand-off who never saw anything untoward and had sought to address concerns about the Islamic Centre. “We take a clear stand against any form of extremism,” said Christian Muhammad Jawad Sandow, a German convert to Islam and a member of the congregation.

Police who supervise the prayers have moved the faithful away from the mosque’s gates to avoid bothering locals on the wealthy street. Mr Sandow said the worshippers were using their prayers, consisting of a Du'a' Kumayl chant on Thursday evenings, as well as a regular Friday gathering, as a form of peaceful protest.

Shiite Muslims locked out of the Blue Mosque pray on Thursdays and Fridays on a nearby pavement. The National

Propaganda machine

A propaganda website run by Yavuz Ozoguz, a German MP’s brother, has rallied opposition to the crackdown. During the raids connected to the Blue Mosque’s closure, he was one of those who got a knock on the door by masked police. As the operator of the website called Muslim Market that shares pro-Iran and anti-Israel content – and where he described Hezbollah in 2020 as “mainly known for its dedication to social policy” – he has been on the radar of German intelligence services for more than two decades.

Mr Ozoguz also runs a publishing house called Eslamica with his brother, Gurhan, which investigators suspected of working for the Islamic Centre of Hamburg. A video offshoot of his website called Muslim TV shows sermons and events from various mosques in Germany, including by Yavuz Özoguz’s son Huseyin.

Yavuz Özoguz, who has been on the radar of intelligence services for more than 20 years, broadcasts anti-Israel views on his website and YouTube channel.

Necla Kelek, the founder of a group of secular Muslims in Hamburg, described the website as a “petty arm” of the Iranian regime which provides readers with the “necessary ideological outfit”. She said leadership roles in Hamburg were a “career springboard” for those who came and went from Iran.

The Turkish-born Ozoguz brothers have a sister, Aydan Ozoguz, who sits in Germany’s parliament as deputy speaker and a Social Democratic MP and distances herself from her brothers’ views. Approached by The National on the campaign trail for Germany’s February 23 election, she said she supported the crackdown in Hamburg while sympathising with the displaced faithful.

“The ban on this centre is absolutely understandable. It had been prepared for a long time, and I think the fact that they were directly linked to Iran is perfectly clear,” she said, adding that “in some cases there’s no getting around a ban, as I believe is true in this case”.

“But there is something that nobody wants to think about any more, and it’s something that worries me, which is that it was the only centre for Shiites in Hamburg. And they – normal, upstanding Shiites, they exist too – they are now sort of homeless. There are a couple of things that you do have to consider as part of this.”

She drew a parallel with her own legal loss to far-right politician Alexander Gauland, who had called for Ms Ozoguz to be “disposed of” to Turkey, to highlight the difficulty of winning a legal battle with hardliners. “With a ban in the wrong place you can do a lot wrong, so you have to weigh it up very closely.”

Aydan Ozoguz distances herself from the views of her brothers and says she supports the closure of Hamburg's Blue Mosque. Getty Images

After the Hamburg raids, a less measured Yavuz Ozoguz thundered on his website that it was Germany’s “blackest day since the Second World War” as far as religious freedom was concerned. “On July 24, 2024, Germany banned Shiite Islam”, he wrote. This month he said he would consider voting for the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party to shake things up and promote traditional family values, despite acknowledging it might like to deport him, but ultimately recommended a left-populist party instead.

Police searched the Al Mustafa Society in 2020 when a nationwide ban was issued on Hezbollah activities. Getty Images

Doing enough

Although Germany “has really picked up its pace, and has shown a lot less tolerance for Hezbollah militant activity in the country,” it still has to show that suspects are supporting terrorism, Mr Levitt said. “That will limit their ability to shut down some entity, whether it’s a youth organisation or something else, simply because they show some affinity for Hezbollah, if that affinity is for Hezbollah writ large.

"When they get information that people are being radicalised to violence, the German authorities in recent years have shown a predilection to act."

The Blue Mosque has had its gates locked and been fitted with security cameras since German authorities moved in last year. The National

The spy agencies also try to share intelligence on the movements of individuals. “With precisely these networks, they have to make sure, if someone disappears in Hamburg, that they ask if they’ve turned up somewhere else,” Ms Imhof said. “If they haven’t been seen for a few weeks, where are they?”

Yet the network has not disappeared. The Islamic Centre of Hamburg is suing the Interior Ministry in a last-ditch attempt to block the ban. “The whole scene in Hamburg is being monitored. You can’t just stand back now and say it's banned now, they can’t be here any more, so they’ve all gone. That of course is nonsense,” Ms Imhof said.

Its foreign links offers Hezbollah a lifeline at a time when it has suffered a humiliating collapse in Lebanon itself. “There’s been a lot of Hezbollah infrastructure destroyed, a lot of people killed. The dead Hezbollah fighters’ families need to be taken care of, new fighters need to be recruited,” Mr Levitt said. “All that costs money at a time when Hezbollah is on its back foot, Iran is on its back foot, and so while they still get the overwhelming majority of their money from Iran, the expectation is that they will rely even more on their foreign illicit financial networks.”

If Hezbollah could not hide entirely, it has at least made itself hard to pin down. When police entered the Blue Mosque a few weeks after war broke out in the Middle East, the sheer volume of books, flyers, documents, phones and laptops saw the authorities call in the help of Islamic experts who joined in the raids. “We don’t yet know about everything that was found in the raid at the Blue Mosque,” Ms Kelek said.