MUNICH, 7 September 2003 — A German investigation into the Sept. 11 attacks, believed to have been devised and led by a group of Muslim students from Hamburg, has found that Ramzi Bin Al-Shibh, captured a year ago in Pakistan, was the leader, according to a report yesterday.
For the past two years, it had been believed that Mohammed Atta, an Egyptian who probably piloted the first jet, American Airlines flight 11, into the North Tower of the World Trade Center, was the cell leader.
The report, to appear Monday in the German news weekly Focus, said the inquiry had meanwhile cleared a businessman, named only as T., who had been suspected of bringing Islamists into Germany with fake papers. Officials confirmed this to Deutsche Presse-Agentur.
However a spokeswoman for the federal prosecutor-general’s office in Karlsruhe, southern Germany, said Focus was incorrect in reporting that the inquiry against a second businessman, Mamoun Darkazanli, had been closed.
Whereas US officials have generally stressed Osama Bin Laden and his Al-Qaeda network as the author of the attacks, German investigators have contended the original conspiracy took place in Hamburg and that Al-Qaeda was then tapped for funds, training and additional men.
Focus quoted Germany’s federal intelligence coordinator, Ernst Uhrlau, as saying, “Bin Al-Shibh is the most important figure in the Hamburg terrorist cell and was above Atta in the hierarchy.”
He said that assessment was based on transcripts of the interrogation of Bin Al-Shibh, a Yemeni who was taken into custody in Karachi, Pakistan on Sept. 11, 2002, exactly one year after the attacks.
The United States has never disclosed where it is keeping him, but he is believed to be under continuing interrogation by the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Parts of the transcripts have been passed on to the Germans, Focus said.
At the start of the year, the United States rejected a plea by German judges to hear Bin Al-Shibh as a witness at the trial of Mounir Al-Motassadeq, a Moroccan subsequently jailed for 15 years for being a member of the Hamburg cell.
A second Moroccan, Abdel-Ghani Mzoudi, is currently on trial in Hamburg on similar charges including 3,066 counts of murder.
The trials have been told Bin Al-Shibh sought but failed to obtain a US visa, leading to speculation that he too had been earmarked for pilot training and that he had wanted to fly one of the four hijacked airliners.
In September a year ago, German police raided the offices of T., an importer and dual German-Syrian national, on suspicion of smuggling Islamists into the country. He was not arrested, but he and his wife and their two sons were questioned.
The news magazine Der Spiegel later claimed his company, Tatex, was suspected of links to Syrian intelligence.
Focus said the file on him was closed at the end of June this year after failing to find sufficient evidence to charge him.
The prosecutor’s spokeswoman said an inquiry was still under way against the other businessman, Darkazanli, who allegedly had business links with Al-Qaeda and prayed at the same mosque as the conspirators.
She said a request for information from abroad about him had not yet been fulfilled. Focus said no evidence against him been found in Germany and the Americans had failed to come up the promised evidence against him.
Darkazanli, who was questioned in Hamburg the day after the attacks but not arrested, subsequently told reporters he had moved from his Syrian homeland to Germany to avoid military service.
He said he was married to a German woman and earned commission trading from his tiny Hamburg apartment. He said many people approached him to set up import-export deals and the like.
He asserted he had been only barely acquainted with Atta and the others. US inquiries have highlighted his business relationships with Mamduh Mahmud Salim, an alleged Bin Laden fund-raiser, and Wahid Al-Hage, currently serving out a terrorism conviction in New York.
Focus said that in the two years since the deadly attacks on New York and Washington, federal German authorities had conducted a total of 60 prosecutorial inquiries against a total of 100 persons suspected of involvement in Islamist terrorism.
In many cases the evidence gathered was not enough to lay charges.
At the Mzoudi trial, a federal prosecutor, Matthias Krauss, stated last month that the Hamburg cell comprised Mzoudi, Motassadeq, Atta and Bin Al-Shibh along with suicide pilots Marwan Al-Shehhi and Ziad Jarrah and two men still at large.
Those still on the wanted list worldwide are Zakariya es-Sabar, 26, of Morocco and dual Moroccan-German national Said Bahaji, 28.
