Posted on 11/02/2002 11:29:16 AM PST by knighthawk
BERLIN: A German-born Syrian suspected of involvement in the September 11 attacks and currently detained in Syria, has admitted he had planned to bomb the US consulate in Hamburg in 1998, a German news report said on Saturday.
Mohammed Haydar Zammar admitted during interrogation that he had kept a watch on the consulate in the north German city, but abandoned the plan because of the tight security measures in place there, the magazine Der Spiegel said in its edition to be published on Monday.
The magazine, which did not cite its source for the report, did not indicate the circumstances of the interrogation.
Zamar lived in Hamburg, where he is said to have met Mohammed Atta, the suspected leader of the group of 19 suicide hijackers who carried out the September 11, 2001 attacks on New York and Washington.
He fled Germany in October 2001 after being questioned and released by authorities in the wake of the attacks. He was arrested in Morocco earlier this year and sent to Syria.
In an earlier edition, Spiegel had reported that Zamma's passport was found in the Afghanistan home of the operational chief of Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda network, Mohammed Atef, who was reportedly killed when his house was bombed by US forces in November last year.
If people want on or off this list, please let me know.
By the way, did you see that ananova report that German authorities are now confirming that the meeting in Prague between Atta and al-Ani really took place, and that after that Atta kept the anthrax in Hamburg? I couldn't find that either in Spiegel or Focus, the German newsweeklies. But, if the report is true, the source of the info is presumably that same guy being held in Syria. As a leading member of the Hamburg cell, he was in a position to know.
BTW, whatever happened to the two people that were planning to bomb a US Army base in Germany?
Once they were arrested, they disappeared from the news here in the US.
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