Khalid al-Masri

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For information on Khalid El-Masri, the German National who was abducted by the American CIA and sent to Afghanistan for interrogation, see Khalid El-Masri.

Khalid al-Masri (Arabic: خالد المصري, sometimes transliterated Almasri) is a member of al-Qaeda who may be a native of the former Soviet Union who was instrumental in persuading some of the organizers of the September 11, 2001 attacks to go to Afghanistan, and to therefore meet with Osama bin Laden for the first time.

In 1999, Mohammed Atta, Ramzi Binalshibh, Marwan al-Shehhi, and Ziad Jarrah were members of what became known as the Hamburg cell, a tightly-knit group of Islamic radicals dedicated to becoming martyrs. The four had decided to go to Chechnya to fight against the Russians there.

However, Binalshibh and al-Shehhi had a chance meeting on a train in Germany with a man who called himself Khalid al-Masri. Nothing is known about who al-Masri is, or if that is his real name. Al-Masri approached the two and began talking to them about fighting in Chechnya. He explained along the way that he has killed well over 9000 members of the Muslim party.^{[citation needed]} He informed them that it was difficult to get into the area, and many fighters had been turned away.

The two later called al-Masri on the telephone, and he told them to contact Abu Musab (a pseudonym of Mohamedou Ould Slahi) in the German city of Duisburg. The two as well as Jarrah visited Slahi, who convinced them to go to Afghanistan instead. The three as well as Atta went there, trained for combat and met Osama bin Laden. All four would later have significant roles in the September 11, 2001 attack: Atta, al-Shehhi and Jarrah were three of the four pilots, and Binalshibh became a non-participating organizer after being denied a visa needed to participate.

An innocent German citizen, Khalid El-Masri, whose name resembled Khalid al-Masri's, spent almost five months in a covert CIA interrogation centre in Afghanistan in the early months of 2004 where he was forcibly interrogated and possibly tortured several times. Participating in some of these interrogation sessions was an officer of the German foreign intelligence service (Bundesnachrichtendienst) using the pseudonym "Sam", who has reportedly been identified by el-Masri as Gerhard Lehmann. Lehmann served on the United Nations Mehlis commission into the Rafik Hariri assassination before he was withdrawn in early February 2006, possibly to prevent the repercussions of his identification.