57-year-old Mohammed Haydar Zammar, a Syrian-born German citizen, was detained in Syria more than a month ago
It was confirmed that the outspoken, flamboyant jihadist was a member of the Hamburg cell that included the 9/11 ringleaders Mohammed Atta, who piloted the first plane into the twin towers, Ziad Samir Jarrah and Marwan al-Shehhi.
Zammar’s family abandoned their native city of Aleppo and resettled in Hamburg in 1971. This was when the secular regime of Hafez al-Assad, the president’s father, was waging war on the Muslim Brotherhood.
Zammar was a devout youth who fell under the influence of radical preachers and in the early 1990s travelled to Afghanistan. There he received training at an al-Qaeda military camp. In 1995 he went to Bosnia to volunteer in the war against Serbian forces. A year later he was back in Afghanistan where he met Osama Bin Laden.
