Khalid el-Masri (29 June 1963-) was a Lebanese-German citizen and al-Qaeda recruiter who was instrumental in the creation of the Hamburg cell in the 1990s; he was responsible for recruiting several 9/11 attackers.
Biography[]
Khalid el-Masri was born on 29 June 1963 in Kuwait to a Muslim family from Lebanon, and he grew up in his parents' home country. During the 1980s, he sought political asylum in Germany during the Lebanese Civil War, and in 1994 he obtained German citizenship after marrying a German woman. He was involved with the Hamburg cell in northern Germany, where he met with some future 9/11 hijackers and recruited some of them. el-Masri, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, Mohamed Atta, and Ziad Jarrah set up a group of 19 hijackers that took part in the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks, and el-Masri was abducted by Macedonian police and CIA personnel on 31 December 2003 while on vacation to Skopje.