Atta's al-Qaida recruiter identified

HAMBURG, Germany -- Investigators of the Sept. 11 plot have identified the man who recruited Mohamed Atta and other Hamburg-based hijackers into al-Qaida 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 told the Washington Post.

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.

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-Qaida's deadliest operation.

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 group who had anti-Western views fell under Zammar's influence.

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.

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 on Oct. 27, ostensibly to get a divorce from a Moroccan woman. Two days before his departure for Morocco he was issued a one-year passport, officials said.

German officials confirmed that Zammar reached Morocco, but he subsequently disappeared.

Zammar's partner and six children are in Hamburg, and his family has filed a missing persons report.

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, the Post reported.

Zammar, who German officials said is a veteran of an al-Qaida 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 into the second-floor walkup. 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.

Before 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.

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