Said Bahaji
Said Bahaji, alias Saeed Bahaji and Zuhayr al-Maghribi, (15th July 1975 - September 2013) was a Moroccan-German Al-Qaeda member and alleged member of the Hamburg Cell, an Al-Qaeda cell that provided support to the perpetrators of the September 11 attacks.
Biography edit
Bahaji was born in Germany in 1975. He moved to Morocco in 1984, later moving back to Germany in 1995. While he was a student in Germany, Bahaji was introduced to Militant Islam by other students, resulting in his radicalization.
On 1st November 1998, Bahaji moved into an apartment with Al-Qaeda members and future hijackers Mohamed Atta and Ramzi bin al-Shibh. The three of them later formed the Hamburg Cell with Marwan al-Shehhi, Zakariya Essabar, Mounir el-Motassadeq, Abdelghani Mzoudi and others. In 1999, the cell decided to go to Chechnya to fight against the Russians, but were convinced by an unidentified Al-Qaeda operative known only as "Khalid al-Masri" to go to Afghanistan, where they trained for terrorist attacks under Osama bin Laden. Bahaji was subsequently placed on a watchlist when they returned to Hamburg.
A week before 9/11, Bahaji decided to return to Afghanistan to serve Al-Qaeda, and was informed by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed that it would soon become difficult for him to leave, as after 9/11 he would be arrested as an accessory, and so he should leave as soon as possible. Bahaji left for Afghanistan on the 4th of September.
After the attack took place, Bahaji, al-Shibh and Essabar were named as accessories and warrants were issued for their arrests. al-Shibh was captured by the Inter-Services Intelligence in Pakistan and deported to America in 2002, but Bahaji remained at large. He was later confirmed to be hiding in Pakistan when his passport was discovered in a captured militant town in 2009.
In August 2017, Ayman al-Zawahiri revealed that Bahaji, under the alias Zuhayr al-Maghribi, had been killed at the Afghanistan-Pakistan border in September 2013. The United Nations Security Council later officially confirmed this in a report issued listing people and entities sought by the council.