Montasser el-Zayat

His former clients are said to have included Ayman al-Zawahiri, since 2011 the leader of al-Qaeda, the terrorist organization based in Afghanistan and Pakistan. He also defended al-Gama'a al-Islamiyya.

In May 2009, Al Arabiya reported that el-Zayat had been invited to defend Mustafa Al-Hawsawi, one of the fourteen high-value detainees held at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp, before a Guantanamo military commission. El-Zayat described thinking at first that he was the target of a hoax.

He has written a book entitled Ayman al-Zawahiri as I Knew Him (2006), which is strongly critical of al-Zawahiri.

El-Zayat also represented Ahmad Ibrahim al-Sayyid al-Naggar in the 1999 case of the Returnees from Albania. On 1 December 2002 the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review reported that el-Zayat "accused the United States of 'invading the region and imposing its policies — it wants to interfere with our life, and it wants us to modify our religious curriculum. ... This is why the people approved of what happened in Kuwait, Yemen and Bali".

Following the 1981 assassination of Anwar Sadat, as a young man, el-Zayat was one of the hundreds of politically active Egyptians who were rounded up. He was detained for three years although he was never tried or convicted.

Montasser el-Zayat (IPA: [monˈtɑsˤeɾ el-, ez- zæjˈjæːt] ) or Muntasir al-Zayyat (Arabic: منتصر الزيات ‎ Muntaṣir az-Zayyāt) (born 1956) is an Egyptian lawyer and author whose former clients, according to press reports, included Ayman al-Zawahiri, since 2011 the leader of al-Qaeda, the terrorist organization, and al-Gama'a al-Islamiyya.

Montasser al-Zayat was born in 1956 in Egypt and educated there. His family is of Nubian descent.