Government Claims Ignorance

Germany had "no idea" a man whose first name and telephone number it passed to U.S. authorities long before the Sept. 11 attacks would turn out to be a key player in the plot, German Interior Minister Otto Schily said on Tuesday. The minister said a New York Times article saying Germany had given the Central Intelligence Agency the information about Marwan al-Shehhi in March 1999 was misleading.

U.S. officials say al-Shehhi was the pilot who flew the second plane into the World Trade Center. The attacks, which destroyed the Twin Towers, damaged the Pentagon and caused one aircraft to crash into a Pennsylvania field, claimed about 3,000 lives.

"Your article was a little bit misleading," Schily told a small group of reporters including one of the authors of the New York Times story.

He said any indication that German intelligence officials had made a link between the name and an upcoming attack "is not true. At that time we had no idea that (it) could be a thing like this (the Sept. 11 attacks)." Schily said Germany gave the information on Shehhi to the United States as part of "routine" data exchanges, adding that authorities were unable to connect the rather common Arabic name "Marwan" to a family name.

A U.S. official told Reuters: "Such a common name does not lead you anywhere."  According to the New York Times, German intelligence officials asked the CIA to track Shehhi.

The name and phone number in the United Arab Emirates were obtained by the Germans by monitoring the telephone of Mohamed Heidar Zammar, an Islamic militant in Hamburg who was closely linked to the al Qaeda plotters who masterminded the Sept. 11 attacks, the Times said, citing German officials.

But after the Germans passed the information on to the CIA, they did not hear from the Americans about the matter until after Sept. 11, the story said, citing a senior German intelligence official. German domestic and foreign intelligence officials declined to comment on the report. The CIA decided that "Marwan" was probably an associate of Osama bin Laden, but never tracked him down, the newspaper said, citing American officials. An independent U.S. commission investigating Sept. 11, the Times reported, is looking at the information.

FMI: www.cia.gov