A German extremist with links to Sept. 11 ringleader Mohamed Atta and other attackers has been detained in Syria, the AFP news agency reported late Wednesday.
“Mohammed Haydar Zammar has been arrested by Kurdish security forces in northern Syria and is now being interrogated,” AFP quoted a Kurdish military commander as saying. NBC News was not immediately able to independently confirm the report.
Germany's Bild newspaper reported that Zammar had been captured by the Kurdish People's Defense Forces, which is among the militias allied with the U.S.-led coalition fighting ISIS in northern Syria.
According to the official Congressional report into the 9/11 attacks by al Qaeda, Zammar is a Syrian-born German national who lived in Hamburg. It described him as an "outspoken, flamboyant Islamist" and a "possible recruiter" of some 9/11 attackers.
The 9/11 Commission Report said Zammar was "a well-known figure in the Muslim community (and to German and U.S. intelligence agencies by the late 1990s)," adding that he had fought in Afghanistan and "relished any opportunity to extol the virtues of violent jihad.”
Atta was born in Egypt and studied in Hamburg. Atta was the head of the so-called Hamburg cell, which was central to the attacks on the United States.
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After 9/11, “Zammar reportedly took credit for influencing Ramzi Binalshibh,” as well as to “the rest of the Hamburg group,” the Congressional report added. Binalshibh was later sent to Guantanamo Bay for his alleged role in planning and providing logistical support for the Sept. 11 attacks.
The Congressional report said that “owing to Zammar’s persuasion or some other source of inspiration,” by the late 1990s Binalshibh, Atta and fellow attackers Marwan al-Shehhi and Ziad Jarrah “eventually prepared themselves to translate their extremists beliefs into action.”
Binalshibh, Atta, al-Shehhi and Jarrah are considered part of the Hamburg cell, which “shared the anti-U.S. fervor” of other extremists, according to the Congressional report, with the “added enormous advantages of fluency in English and familiarity with life in the West.”
Atta, who is considered the operational leader of the 9/11 conspiracy, served as the pilot for American Airlines Flight 11 that crashed into the North Tower of the World Trade Center. Al-Shehhi flew United Airlines Flight 175 into the South Tower. Jarrah was flying United Airlines Flight 93, intending to crash it into either the Capitol or the White House in Washington, when it plowed into a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, following a revolt by passengers.
Zammar was detained by the CIA in Morocco in late 2001 and was later handed over to the Syrian government, Germany's Der Spiegel reported in 2005. At the time, the magazine said Zammar was being held in the notorious Far-Filastin prison in Damascus.
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In 2007, a Syrian court sentenced Zammar to 12 years in prison for being a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, but he got out in 2013 after that country's civil war broke out, AFP reported.
According to German newspaper reports, he was released as part of a prisoner exchange between Islamist rebels and the government of President Bashar al-Assad. Zammar is believed to be aged in his 50s.
Officials at the German Foreign Office said they were aware of reports that Zammar was in the custody in Syria, but could not confirm them.
American officials were not immediately available for comment.