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In Another CIA Abduction, Germany Has an Uneasy Role
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German authorities have made few statements about the case. The German Foreign Ministry did not respond to several requests for an interview. The German Embassy in Damascus, which has been monitoring Zammar's closed-door trial, declined to comment.
Zammar reemerged last October, when a European Union official monitoring trials in Damascus saw him in a state security court and notified the German Embassy. If not for the chance encounter, Zammar might have remained out of sight forever, Pinar said. "No one in the world would have known," she said.
A spokeswoman for the European Commission delegation in Syria declined to comment, calling the case a "highly sensitive subject."
Zammar, 45, was born in Syria but emigrated to Germany in 1972 and obtained citizenship there. Syrian authorities have charged him with membership in the Muslim Brotherhood, a fundamentalist group that is banned in the country, and with visiting al-Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan. It is unclear whether he is charged with committing any crimes in Syria.
A parliamentary committee is expected to review the German government's handling of Zammar's case later this month. One question is whether information obtained by German interrogators is being used against him in court by Syrian prosecutors, a particularly sensitive issue since he faces the death penalty, which is banned in Germany.
"It is a big problem, I believe, for Germany and the federal government," said Hans-Christian Stroebele, a member of the committee from the Greens party. "It's the duty of a state to help its citizens. But clearly in Zammar's case, the state did not do this."
Former inmates in Syria, including Maher Arar, a Canadian citizen who was similarly targeted for rendition by the CIA but later released, have said that Zammar was kept in a tiny cell in a special prison wing. They said prisoners were regularly tortured, and that Zammar -- who tipped the scales at 300 pounds when he lived in Hamburg -- had lost about a third of his weight.
Special correspondent Shannon Smiley contributed to this report.
