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News of Jan
4, 2007
First Convict to be Sentenced
at Final 9/11 Hearing
By Jean-Baptiste Piggin
Hamburg, Jan 4
Mounir al-Motassadeq, the first man convicted of a role in the 9/11
terror attacks, faces court for a fifth time Friday during which he
could get a jail term of up to 15 years. Security will be tight at
the courthouse in the German city of Hamburg where the Moroccan was
convicted in 2005 of terrorism and sentenced to seven years in jail.
A further conviction on 246 counts of accessory to murder was added
on appeal.
After two full-scale trials and two appeals, Motassadeq, 32, will
this time only face an abbreviated trial on five hearing days
stretching into February to determine a suitable punishment for
assisting the killings of the 9/11 hijack victims.
Ladislav Anisic, a lawyer for him, has forecast the trial will be
quick. "They'll be over and done with in three days," he said.
The Hamburg judges, who do not have the power to question the
conviction, are expected to increase the seven-year term.
The long-running legal saga has turned on how much Motassadeq, a
Moroccan studying electrical engineering in Germany, could have
known about the plans of his friends, led by suicide pilot Mohammed
Atta, who crashed one passenger jet into the World Trade Center.
The trial court ruled that Motassadeq was in the terrorist cell, and
the appeal judges added that he must have known in advance that all
the occupants of the four hijacked planes would be killed.
Only one other 9/11 accessory, Zacarias Moussaoui, also of Moroccan
descent, has been tried. He received life imprisonment May 4 last
year from a US court.
Several other alleged 9/11 conspirators who were not among the 19
suicide attackers are still at large or in custody without trial.
Motassadeq's odyssey through the courts began with his October 2001
arrest as German police uncovered his association with Atta. He was
given the maximum 15-year sentence in 2003. At a retrial ending in
August 2005, he was convicted of terrorism only.
Much of the legal argument over his case was about whether he could
have foreseen in conversations with Atta the extraordinary damage to
be inflicted by the attacks, with two of the world's highest
buildings collapsing and 3,000 people killed.
Later comments by terrorist leader Osama bin Laden suggested that
even the terrorist kingpin did not realise that the fires caused by
the crashed jets would melt the steel frames of the World Trade
Center towers in New York.
Motassadeq, who is married with at least one child, has spent long
periods free on bail in Hamburg, but was barred from resuming his
studies. German authorities plan to expel him after his jail term.
Illustrating the difficulties German judges have had interpreting
the evidence, Abdel-Ghani Mzoudi, another associate of the Hamburg
suicide pilots, was acquitted on similar evidence to that brought
against Motassadeq and went home to Morocco.
Both Mzoudi and Motassadeq were Islamists who had trained at Al
Qaeda camps in Afghanistan, then returned to Hamburg.
German authorities gave up trying to imprison other associates.
An inquiry against Mamoun Darkanzali, a Syrian-born Hamburg trader,
was abandoned last year for lack of evidence, though he knew the
suicide pilots and had business dealings with bin Laden's group.
Another Syrian-born man, Mohammad Haidar Sammar, allegedly recruited
the Hamburg attackers to Al Qaeda. German police questioned but did
not arrest him. He is now in Syrian custody awaiting trial.
Christian Ganczarski, a German who converted to Islam, is in French
custody. German authorities said his close contacts to bin Laden
were insufficient to lead to charges under German law.
DPA
News of Jan
4, 2007
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