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9/11 hijackers called Syria, Saudi Arabia
The Sept. 11 hijackers made dozens of telephone calls to Saudi Arabia and Syria in the months before the attacks, according to a classified report from the office of German Chancellor Angela Merkel.According to the report, 206 international telephone calls were known to have been made by the leaders of the hijacking plot after they arrived in the United States - including 29 to Germany, 32 to Saudi Arabia and 66 to Syria. The calls to Germany are not especially surprising because the plot's organizers, Mohamed Atta, Marwan al-Shehhi and Ziad Jarrah, who moved to Florida to learn to fly passenger jets, had been university students in the northern German city of Hamburg when they were recruited by al-Qaida. More than four years later, however, the hijackers' connections to Saudi Arabia and Syria are far from fully explained. The German report contains no information about the timing or recipients of the calls, except that the majority of them were made from a cell phone registered to al-Shehhi, a native of the United Arab Emirates. It said the telephone records were obtained by German intelligence agencies from the FBI. Within hours of the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, German agencies learned that, during their student days, Atta and his co-conspirators had been in close touch with al-Qaida's principal representatives in Hamburg, Mamoun Darkazanli and Mohammed Zammar, both Syrian expatriates who became German citizens. Spanish authorities later prosecuted several other expatriate Syrians in Madrid with links to Darkazanli and Zammar, most of them members of the Syrian wing of the radical Muslim Brotherhood. One, Imad Eddin Barakat Yarkas, was sentenced last year to 27 years in a Spanish prison for providing the hijackers logistical assistance. The German report submitted last week notes that in the days after Sept. 11, Syria and its intelligence service offered their cooperation to the United States and West European nations, "comprehensively and without any reservation." A senior U.S. diplomat serving in the American Embassy in Damascus on Sept. 11 recalled that, before the Syrian commitment began to wane, the Syrians provided the Americans intelligence that led to the breakup of a terrorist plot against the United States that was being assembled in Canada. Later, when the CIA arranged for Mohammed Zammar to be arrested by Moroccan authorities during a visit to Casablanca, the Syrians agreed to take custody of Zammar and locked him in a Damascus prison, where he is believed to remain today. The report's disclosure that senior officials in the government of former German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder traveled to Syria to participate in the questioning of Zammar is likely to raise further questions within the parliament over Germany's involvement in the CIA's forced relocation of terrorist suspects to countries like Syria, where many say they have been tortured. The complicity of European governments in the practice the CIA terms "rendition" also has become a political live wire in several other European countries, with opposition parties demanding inquiries into whether their governments were aware that CIA aircraft used their airports and airspace to transport suspects to Egypt, Syria and Saudi Arabia. Posted by: Dan Darling 2006-03-08 |
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