HAMBURG – German police have reportedly identified a potential suicide bomber named a week ago in a CIA warning.

The weekly magazine Stern quoted “security sources” saying police in a “southern German metropolitan area” had matched the name in the warning with a

Kurd on the local aliens register.

Police cordoned off a military hospital in the northern city of Hamburg on 30 December after the CIA warned the facility might be a target. The guards remain in place.

Stern said the Kurd was one of two people named by the CIA as brothers who had entered Germany using forged Turkish passports. He was identified as Abu-Mussab al-Sarkawi, an Islamist believed linked to al-Qaeda.

Police recognized the name as that of a Turkish national who had already been the object of an inquiry over his activities with the banned former Kurdish Workers Party PKK, a secular Turkish group.

Federal Crime Agency BKA officials in Wiesbaden declined comment. They said there had been no change to Germany’s security risks.

The interior minister of Hamburg, Dirk Nockemann, asserted last week that the threats should be laid at the doorstep of Ansar al- Islam, a Iraqi Kurdish group with a hatred both of secular parties and the United States.

A Hamburg parliamentary committee dominated by his political opponents rebuked

Nockemann for making details of the threat public. Nockemann identified the source as the US Central Intelligence Agency.