Tuesday, May 24, 2005

German magazine names alleged 9/11 messenger

Khaleej Times OnlineHAMBURG - The courier sent from Hamburg to forewarn Al Qaeda chiefs in Afghanistan about the September 11, 2001 attacks on New York and Washington will be named in evidence to be produced in a Hamburg court this week, German news magazines said on Saturday.

The man, Moroccan student Zakariya es-Sabar, has been widely identified in past accounts of the attack as the conspirator who passed a cryptic message from the Hamburg cell to Khaled Sheikh Mohammed, a senior Al Qaeda operative who is in US custody.

The Focus weekly said he would be officially named in a new collation of evidence by US authorities that has been sent to Germany for production at the trial of Mounir al-Motassadeq, another Moroccan student who did arms training at an Afghan camp and returned to Hamburg.

Es-Sabar has not been seen since shortly before the attacks. Focus said that another captive, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, stated that he sent es-Sabar to Pakistan to tell a contact there the date of the attack.

However no contact with Khaled Sheikh Mohammed could be established, and es-Sabar phoned Hamburg to say he had been unsuccessful. It was not clear how Al Qaeda was ultimately informed.

The website of another magazine, Der Spiegel, said the US documents would quote bin al-Shibh as stating that a courier was told to pass on the words “eleven nine” without knowing what they meant.

Es-Sabar was also allegedly ordered to obtain a US visa so he could participate in the attacks, but was denied such a visa.

Focus said the documents did not incriminate the Hamburg defendant, Motassadeq, while Spiegel said they undermined the prosecution case that the plot was developed in Hamburg in 1999. Bin al-Shibh said the conspiracy began in 2000.

Focus quoted Motassadeq’s lawyer as saying the new evidence was mainly of assistance to the defence case. Motassadeq is being re- tried after a German appeals court overturned his original conviction and sentence to 15 years in jail for being a terrorist.

Both news magazines go on sale Monday with the story.

While elaborate accounts of the conspiracy have appeared in the media and in the US congressional 9-11 report, Hamburg judges have pushed hard to be told the precise provenance of the evidence.

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