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The War Profiteers - War Crimes,
Kidnappings, Torture and Big Money |
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November 27th,
2006 - A German Islamist Faces Death Penalty in Syria |
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A German Islamist Faces
Death Penalty in Syria By Holger Stark Der Spiegel November 27, 2006 For the first time, German
diplomats have now been permitted to visit Syrian-born German citizen
Mohammed Zammar in prison. Zammar faces the death penalty in Damascus, and
the case against him is based in part on evidence from Germany. The muezzin at the Omajjaden
Mosque had just called the faithful to evening prayers when the telephone
rang at the German embassy in Damascus. The caller, an official with the
Syrian Foreign Ministry, was clearly in a hurry. He was calling to discuss an
offer from his government, but the Germans, he said, would have to act
quickly - preferably right away. It was Tuesday, Nov. 7. A consular official,
following the Syrian's instructions, called for a car and drove north along a
country road. Her destination, the Saidnaya Prison in a small mountain
village outside Damascus, has three wings designed like the spokes on the
famed Mercedes star. At about 8 p.m., the
diplomat met with a man who has since become an international symbol of what
happens when questionable methods are employed in the war against terror. The
prisoner was Syrian-born German citizen Mohammed Haydar Zammar, 45, a friend
of the Sept. 11 pilots who had lived in Hamburg. After the attacks of Sept.
11, 2001, the CIA had Zammar abducted and taken to Syria where, according to
fellow prisoners, he was tortured. The meeting was the first
time a representative of the German government met with the now-prominent
prisoner since German security officials interrogated Zammar under dubious
circumstances in November 2002. His fate and the questionable role played by
German authorities who had notified the Americans of Zammar's travel plans in
the first place, has now become the subject of a government investigation in
Berlin. Zammar met with the German
diplomat for one hour. Al-Qaida detainees are kept in a wing of the prison
that is isolated from the rest of the facility and dubbed the "black
gate" by other prisoners. At the end of the conversation, Zammar asked
the German diplomat for winter clothing and some money. A lawyer, he added,
would also be helpful - not an unreasonable request for someone who has been deprived
of legal counsel for almost five years now. Indeed, the Islamist, who
has been a German citizen since 1982, is sorely in need of legal
representation. Zammar's case goes to trial in Damascus next Sunday, when he
will be accused of membership in a brutal organization, the Attar wing of the
Muslim Brotherhood. Prosecutors will also charge him with "attending
training camps in Afghanistan and Bosnia" and "jihadist
ambitions" - offences for which the standard penalty is death. This is
where things become uncomfortable for the German government, because it was
German investigators who supplied important pieces of evidence against Zammar
in the first place. A fair trial is unlikely The trial will take place
before Syria's Supreme State Security Court, a notorious special tribunal in
Damascus that deals exclusively with political cases. Chances are slim that
Zammar will get a fair trial. According to human rights organization Amnesty
International, the judges on the Syrian court have no qualms in allowing
confessions obtained through torture. "Sometimes the lawyers aren't even
allowed to set foot in the courtroom, and sometimes the court bars them from
reviewing the files," says Ruth Jüttner, a Middle East expert with
Amnesty. Moreover, the court's rulings cannot be appealed. When the case against Zammar
was first tried on Oct. 8, the presiding judge read the charges out loud and
promptly characterized Zammar as "a friend of Mohammed Atta and Ziad
Jarrah," the Sept. 11 pilots who had lived in Hamburg. Zammar, whose weight has
dropped from 145 kilograms (320 pounds) to about 90 kilograms (199 pounds)
during his incarceration, stood up and argued in his own defense. He told the
judge that he did not deny having known Jarrah and Atta, but that the two men
had never told him about their grand plan, and that he had been completely in
the dark about the attacks on the United States. He added that although he is
not a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, he certainly supports the mujahedeen,
God willing. The hearing, which a United Nations observer happened to attend,
ended prematurely when Zammar angered the judges by condescendingly informing
them: "jihad is an Islamic duty." An ethical dilemma for Berlin For the German government
the case, and the possibility of Zammar being sentenced to death, means that
it could have some explaining to do before the investigative committee in
Berlin. This is because Syrian authorities were not the only ones who
gathered the evidence against Zammar. Indeed, some of the
incriminating material came directly from the German investigation. In
preparation for a joint task force of German and Syrian security officials,
the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA), handed over many of its records to
the Syrians on Aug. 2, 2002. The German investigators
were convinced that their approach was justified, especially since Zammar was
still being prosecuted in Germany on charges of supporting a terrorist
organization. Providing the material was part of the German officials'
contribution to a planned trip to Syria. Three months after the files
were delivered, five agents from the BKA, the German foreign intelligence
agency (BND), and the domestic intelligence agency, the Office for the
Protection of the Constitution (BfV), were in fact permitted to question the
al-Qaida sympathizer in Damascus. However, the German
officials were not the only ones to analyze the results. The visits, spread
across three days, lasted exactly 15 hours and 20 minutes - and were taped by
the Syrians. One of the main charges in the Syrian case against Zammar, his
visits to al-Qaida training camps in Afghanistan and Bosnia, is clearly
supported by his responses to the German agents' questions. In the interviews, Zammar
tells the Germans in detail how he had traveled to Afghanistan five times
between 1991 and 2000. Before the Germans interrogated Zammar, the Syrians
had complained that the prisoner was only admitting things that they claimed
were already known. But Zammar, who apparently trusted the German delegation
more than the Syrians, identified other mujahedeen in photographs and
incriminated various Syrian exiles. Back in Berlin, the agents from the BKA,
BND and BfV characterized the results of their trip as "good to very
good." "The change in the
group (of interrogators) created a new psychological situation for him,"
the BND officials wrote in their secret interrogation report, "which
could provide new information from which the Syrian service may also
benefit." The domestic intelligence service, the BfV, came to a similar
conclusion in its own secret report: "The interrogations are likely to
have provided considerable new information for the Syrians. The phrasing of
the questions alone has given them a new understanding of the case," because,
as the report continued, the Syrians had "admitted that they conducted
their interrogations in the absence of significant background
information." “A major stomachache” But once the initial
euphoria over the official trip to Damascus had dissipated, BfV experts
sensed just how problematic the process of what August Hanning, the head of
the BND intelligence service, called "giving and taking" with
Syrian President Bashar Assad's regime, a regime despised in the West, could
be. In March 2003, about four
months after the German interrogation in Damascus, the BKA asked BfV
officials in Cologne for access to the file of photographs in which Zammar
had identified other Islamists. The request was flatly denied. On March 10,
2003, a BKA official noted: "The BfV considered it 'inopportune' to
provide access to the photographs that were shown to Zammar." A senior
BKA official wrote his own, handwritten take on the matter: "The BfV now
has a major stomachache." The domestic intelligence
officials were worried "that the public would become aware of the BfV's
involvement in the Syria trip." For the same reason, BfV officials opted
not to take part in a planned meeting with their counterparts at the BKA and
BND, the purpose of which was to exchange information. They had decided to
end any involvement with a country whose secret services were notorious for
their unscrupulousness and whose judicial system is known for its
arbitrariness. The nature of that
relationship will now change in the Zammar case, a reversal the Germans see
as a way of making amends. The German Foreign Ministry plans to send an
observer to witness Zammar's new trial this Sunday, and German diplomats have
now obtained an attorney for the accused terrorist sympathizer, even offering
to pay his legal fees. Like Zammar, the diplomats hope the judges will
exercise leniency. Indeed, the Syrian regime would be doing the German
authorities a great favor if it commuted the expected death sentence to a
lengthy prison term, as it has done before in similar cases. Translated from the German
by Christopher Sultan External link: http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/0,1518,451089,00.html |