The weekly Stern news magazine, citing from a confidential FBI report, said that Ziad Jarrah was questioned for four hours during a January 2000 stopover in the United Arab Emirates.
He was returning from a period at an al-Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan to his then home in Hamburg, northern Germany.
Jarrah told the UAE officials of his Afghanistan stint and of his plans to take flight training lessons in Florida, according to Stern.
The officials passed the information to the US Central Intelligence Agency. Four months later, Jarrah was allowed into the US after receiving a visa.
More than 3 000 people were killed when hijackers slammed two planes into the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon outside Washington.
Jarrah is understood to have piloted a fourth plane, which crashed in rural Pennsylvania after passengers fought back.
The Lebanese national was part of a Hamburg-based al-Qaeda cell led by the hijackers' alleged ringleader Mohammed Atta.
Last week, Stern reported that German intelligence had warned the CIA about another Hamburg cell member, Marwan al-Shehhi, in March 1999.
Al-Shehhi and Atta piloted the two planes that crashed in New York.
According to Stern last week, Germany's domestic intelligence service told the CIA that al-Shehhi was a suspected al-Qaeda member.
The CIA did pass the information on, it added.
Al-Shehhi entered the US on May 30, 2000 and also took flight training lessons in Florida.
Another alleged member of the Hamburg cell, Abdelghani Mzoudi, is currently on trial in the city, accused of accessory to murder in more than 3 000 cases and membership of a terrorist organisation.
Earlier this year, his Moroccan compatriot Mounir el Motassadeq was jailed for the maximum 15 years by the same Hamburg court on the same charges. – Sapa-AFP.
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