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The War Profiteers - War Crimes,
Kidnappings, Torture and Big Money |
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February 12th,
2007 - Terror Suspect Zammar Gets Twelve Years |
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Terror Suspect Zammar Gets
Twelve Years By Der Spiegel February 12, 2007 The German-Syrian Mohammed
Haydar Zammar has been given a 12-year sentence by a court in Damascus. A
friend of the 9/11 leader Mohammed Atta, Zammar was one of the first victims
of the CIA's so-called "extraordinary renditions" program. Now he
has been convicted of being a member of the banned Muslim Brotherhood. The Syrian-born German
citizen Mohammed Haydar Zammar has been sentenced to 12 years in prison by a
court in Damascus. The National Organization for Human Rights in Syria
announced that the verdict had been handed down by the Higher State Security
Court on Sunday. Zammar was accused of being a member of the banned Muslim
Brotherhood, a crime that is punishable by death in Syria. The court, which
is used for political cases, initially sentenced Zammar to life imprisonment
but commuted it to 12 years. The Syrian human rights
group did not give the reason for the commuting of the sentence. Zammar's
German citizenship and the fact that German diplomats were closely monitoring
the trial may have gone some way toward saving him from the gallows. Zammar was part of the
Islamist scene in Hamburg in the late 1990s and traveled to Afghanistan
frequently. He was friends with members of the terrorist cell, led by
Mohammed Atta, which carried out the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and
Washington and was suspected by the US and German intelligence agencies of
having introduced Atta to al-Qaida leaders in Afghanistan. Zammar had come to the
attention of the German authorities long before 9/11, and when his friends
were identified as having carried out the attacks he was brought in for
questioning but was freed for lack of evidence. However, when he traveled to
Morocco shortly afterwards, he was snatched by CIA officers, making him one
of the first victims of "extraordinary renditions." Two weeks later
US officials delivered him to a jail in Syria, a country that practices
torture, and that Washington has branded part of the "Axis of
Evil." Reuters reports that the
human rights activist Ammar al-Kurabi described the ruling as unjust, saying
that the membership charge had been brought against him because there had
been no proof linking Zammar with the 9/11 terror attacks. Syria waged a
fierce crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood in the early 1980s, during which
thousands died, and Islamic fundamentalism is fiercely repressed in the
country. Now Germany's role in the
abduction and conviction of one of its own citizens is coming under the
scrutiny of a parliamentary investigative committee. German intelligence
agencies tipped off the CIA about Zammar's travel plans in Morocco and German
security officials were permitted to interrogate Zammar in his Damascus jail
in late 2002. And some of the incriminating evidence used to prosecute Zammar
in Syria is alleged to have come directly from Germany's Federal Criminal
Police Office (BKA). External link: http://www.spiegel.de/international/0,1518,465783,00.html |