Warrant Issued for Suspect in Hijackings

Disclosing the first fresh lead in the Sept. 11 terror investigation here in nearly a month, German authorities said Friday they have issued an international arrest warrant for a 24-year-old Moroccan believed to have been part of the Hamburg terrorist cell that plotted and carried out the U.S. attacks.

The suspect, Zakariya Essabar, has been charged with “belonging to a terrorist association, thousands of murders and other serious offenses,” federal prosecutor Kay Nehm announced from his headquarters in Karlsruhe.

Essabar was last seen in Hamburg in August. He had contacts with the five other named suspects who lived or studied in Hamburg, and he lived for at least a year in the Marienstrasse apartment rented by two of the accused suicide hijackers, Mohamed Atta and Marwan Al-Shehhi, Nehm said.

The latest suspect in the crimes, which are believed to have been in the works since 1999, applied for a U.S. entry visa twice--on Dec. 12, 2000, and Jan. 28, 2001--but was refused, the prosecutor said. Essabar had wanted to travel to Florida on Feb. 15, Nehm noted, but he declined to say whether the suspect had been trying to join the others for flight training.

Among the evidence linking Essabar to the others is a photograph seized during the search of a Hamburg apartment rented by another fugitive in the case, Said Bahaji, Nehm said. The picture, taken at Bahaji’s 1999 wedding, shows Essabar with the groom, Al-Shehhi and the man accused of piloting the jet that crashed in Pennsylvania, Ziad Samir Jarrah.

Nehm refused to release the picture, which would be the first concrete evidence that the suspected hijackers knew one another in Hamburg.

Essabar also was reported to have worked with Jarrah, a 26-year-old Lebanese with no previous record of extremist views, at a car company during the summer of 1998.

Essabar also has been reported to have funneled money to Ramzi Binalshibh, a 29-year-old Yemeni, who was named as an accomplice in the terrorism plot along with Bahaji in warrants issued Sept. 21. The warrant for Essabar mentions a bank transfer of 1,200 marks, about $560, made to Binalshibh on Dec. 12--the same day Essabar first applied for a U.S. visa.

How the money transfer might be related to the plotting of the Sept. 11 terrorist strikes was not made clear, and officials familiar with the investigation have expressed frustration at the dearth of hard evidence linking the Hamburg suspects with their purported paymasters from the Al Qaeda network of Saudi militant Osama bin Laden.

“There isn’t much of a money trail to follow,” said a senior government official involved in the probe, the most extensive in Germany since police were hunting Red Army Faction terrorists 25 years ago.

As with Bahaji and Binalshibh, the warrant for Essabar acknowledges that his whereabouts are unknown, suggesting that he may have fled the country.