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German recruited { June 12 2002 } Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A34740-2002Jun11.htmlhttp://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A34740-2002Jun11.html
German at Center Of Sept. 11 Inquiry
Suspect Recruited Hijackers in Hamburg
By Peter Finn
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, June 12, 2002; Page A01
HAMBURG -- Investigators of the Sept. 11 plot have identified the man who first recruited Mohamed Atta and other Hamburg-based hijackers into al Qaeda and believe that the suspect, a German citizen of Syrian origin, played a key role in linking Atta with the terrorist network's leadership in Afghanistan, U.S. and German officials said.
German officials say they do not know the whereabouts of the man, Mohammed Haydar Zammar, 41, who was reported missing by his family after he left Hamburg for Morocco last October. One official said the Germans suspect that Zammar is in U.S. custody or being detained in a third country at the behest of the United States.
A U.S. counterterrorism official declined to address Zammar's whereabouts directly, but suggested that U.S. officials know where he is. "Zammar is not walking the streets," said the official. He added later in an interview that Zammar, unlike other suspects who had fled Germany and remain at large, "is not in the wind."
U.S. and German officials agree that Zammar is a pivotal figure in understanding the genesis of the Sept. 11 attacks. His role helps explain how a group of young Muslim immigrants and students, living quiet and seemingly integrated lives in a German city, were transformed into the core of al Qaeda's deadliest operation. Western intelligence agencies hope that by unraveling the mechanics of the plot they will gain insights into al Qaeda cells planning future attacks.
Zammar was a charismatic advocate of Muslims' obligation to engage in holy war, a stance he articulated in a radical Hamburg mosque, officials said. Investigators believe that around 1997, Atta and others in the Hamburg-based group, who already had anti-Western views, fell under Zammar's influence.
The process of radicalization continued in a Hamburg apartment that Atta and two fugitives, Ramzi Binalshibh and Said Bahaji, rented in November 1998 and which they called the "House of Followers." Binalshibh, who failed four times to get a U.S. visa, played a major logistical role in the Sept. 11 plot, officials said.
A Saudi analyst said the Saudis have confirmed a family tie between Binalshibh and one of the key hijackers, Khalid Almihdhar, who was on the airliner that crashed into the Pentagon.
The Saudi analyst said Binalshibh, a Yemeni, is a cousin of Almihdhar's wife. Almihdhar, though a Saudi citizen, came from a prominent Yemeni family. The tie may explain how the German-based group led by Atta was able to coalesce with a larger group of Saudis who became hijackers.
German authorities have issued international arrest warrants for Binalshibh, Bahaji, a German citizen whose father is Moroccan, and Zakariya Essabar, a Moroccan, all of whom fled Germany shortly before Sept. 11. The U.S. counterterrorism official said the three are either dead or "in the wind," possibly hiding in Pakistan.
After the Sept. 11 attacks, Zammar was questioned and released by German police who kept him under surveillance. German officials said they did not have enough evidence to charge Zammar, and he left Germany freely on Oct. 27, ostensibly to obtain a divorce from a Moroccan woman. Two days before his departure for Morocco he was issued a temporary one-year passport, officials said.
"The Americans certainly knew he was leaving," said a senior German official.
German officials said they have confirmed that Zammar reached Morocco, but he subsequently disappeared. Moroccan authorities responded to German queries about his whereabouts by saying he had left Morocco for Spain. But Spanish authorities said they have no evidence that he entered Spain, the Germans said.
Zammar's partner and six children are still in Hamburg, and his family has filed an official missing persons report with German authorities. A family member declined to be interviewed at the family's apartment here.
During the past nine months, the U.S. government has secretly transported dozens of terrorism suspects to countries other than the United States, bypassing extradition procedures, according to Western diplomats and intelligence sources. U.S. intelligence officials are closely involved in the interrogation of many of these suspects, who are distinct from the al Qaeda and Taliban prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, the sources said.
If confirmed, Zammar's capture would raise a difficult diplomatic issue between the United States and Germany or Germany and any third country that might have him. Zammar is a naturalized German citizen and any country holding him would be obliged under international law to notify Germany of his arrest and allow German consular officials access to him.
Zammar, who German officials said is a veteran of an al Qaeda terrorist training camp in Afghanistan and claimed to have fought in Bosnia, was a frequent visitor to Atta's apartment on Marien Street in Hamburg. Neighbors said he regularly pulled up in an old car and carried boxes of material into the second-floor walk-up. A regular group of visitors sat in a circle in the apartment, talking for hours, according to German officials and interviews with neighbors. Zammar, who weighed about 300 pounds, was remembered by neighbors because of his size.
At some point, probably in 1998 or early 1999, the Hamburg group decided to "offer themselves" to al Qaeda, the U.S. counterterrorism official said, describing Zammar as a central player in that process.
"Zammar is in a lead role," the official said. A senior German official agreed that Zammar "played a very significant role."
Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who U.S. authorities last week said orchestrated much of the planning behind the Sept. 11 plot, visited Germany in 1999, U.S. officials said. The officials said they could not confirm, however, that Mohammed visited Atta's apartment in Hamburg in 1999. The Los Angeles Times, citing intelligence officials, first reported Mohammed's visit to Germany and said he had been in the apartment.
The purpose of Mohammed's visit to Germany may have been to evaluate the group. Atta and other members of the Hamburg group subsequently went to al Qaeda facilities in Afghanistan, officials said.
"The operation was planned and coordinated by key people" in Afghanistan, the U.S. official said.
After the recruitment process, however, Zammar continued to play a supporting role, officials believe.
Just before the attacks, in July 2001, Zammar was detained in Jordan and was held for several days before being deported to Germany, according to a German intelligence official. The official said Zammar had been detained while in transit through Jordan, but declined to say where Zammar had been going or why he was held.
Earlier that month, Atta had left the United States to travel to Spain, a trip he also had made in January 2001. The U.S. counterterrorism official said investigators believe that a trusted al Qaeda operative flew to Spain to meet Atta to discuss the operation and subsequently left.
But he said investigators have not identified whom Atta met. "The Madrid time is still a mystery to us," the official said, adding that investigators have discounted a widely held theory that a senior al Qaeda leader, or European mastermind, is a resident on the continent.
"We don't see a lead role in Europe," said the counterterrorism official. Operational communications, he said, were handled by trusted and sometimes very senior al Qaeda runners who could travel freely to Europe, probably because they held Western passports.
Prior to Sept. 11, Zammar had been on a German watch list of suspected Muslim extremists, as was at least one other member of the Hamburg circle, Bahaji, according to an official in Hamburg. After Sept. 11, German police searching Bahaji's apartment found books on holy war in which Zammar had written personal dedications.
Two al Qaeda recruits from Germany, who were arrested in Pakistan on Sept. 10 en route to Afghanistan, later told German authorities that they were recruited by Binalshibh, but Zammar was their principal contact, according to an account in Germany's Der Spiegel magazine.
European officials, including the German authorities, said that while they had indications in the summer of 2001 that al Qaeda was planning a major attack, they had no specifics on what form it would take, where it would occur or who, specifically, was involved.
Increasingly, however, through interrogations, the retrospective scrutiny of intercepts, and seized al Qaeda documents, the internal organization of the plot from genesis to execution is coming into sharper focus.
Mohammed, a 37-year-old Kuwaiti, surfaced in news reports last week after he was described by Abu Zubaida, a recently captured high-ranking al Qaeda leader, as the person who "came up with the plan" to hijack four airliners and target the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon, a senior administration official said.
Other officials, both American and German, said they remain uncertain whether the suicide hijacking idea originated with the Atta group or Mohammed, but, at some point, the plan was accepted as viable by al Qaeda.
Officials said that the leadership in Afghanistan then selected the larger group of Saudi nationals to work with the German-based contingent.
The "jumping-off" point for the plot was a meeting in Malaysia in January 2000 when two of the hijackers, including Almihdhar, met with senior al Qaeda officials who had flown in from Pakistan, the counterterrorism official said. Investigators believe the meeting was called to review failed operations to bomb Los Angeles International Airport and targets in Jordan during millennium celebrations, and to plan both the October 2000 attack on the USS Cole in Yemen and the Sept. 11 attacks in the United States.
The Saudi analyst said officials in Riyadh believe that Osama bin Laden had a direct role in picking the Saudi hijackers, eleven of whom were recruited into al Qaeda while fighting in Chechnya or Bosnia and came from families and tribal areas that led him to believe they were reliable.
Both Saudi and U.S. officials believe that not all the hijackers knew they were on a suicide mission and believed they were the "muscle" for a traditional hijacking, said U.S. officials and the Saudi analyst.
Control of the operational mechanics of the plot lay with Mohammed and others in the al Qaeda leadership, including Zubaida and Muhammad Atef, the terrorist network's military operations chief who was reportedly killed by a U.S. bomb in November, officials said. Mohammed is probably at large in either Afghanistan or the semi-autonomous tribal areas of Pakistan, officials said.
© 2002 The Washington Post Company
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