Terrorist training manuals in PDF format in German, English and Arabic were among the documents found, according to intelligence sources cited by CNN, which said it had obtained details of the documents. The German newspaper Die Zeit was the first to report on the discovery of the documents by German cryptologists inside the memory disk found on a suspected Al Qaeda operative arrested in Berlin last year, it said.

Interrogators questioning a 22-year-old Austrian named Maqsood Lodin, who had recently returned from Pakistan via Budapest, Hungary, and then travelled overland to Germany were surprised to find a digital storage device and memory cards hidden in his underpants. Buried inside them was a pornographic video called "Kick Ass"-and a file marked "Sexy Tanja." Several weeks later, German investigators discovered encoded inside the actual video a treasure trove of intelligence - more than 100 Al Qaeda documents.