GERMANY: German High Court to hear appeal of 9/11 hijackers' friend against terror conviction

A German high court on Thursday (October 12) started considering an appeal by a Moroccan friend of the September 11 hijackers, Mounir El Motassadeq. His lawyer said he hoped Motassadeq's conviction on terrorism charges would be overturned. While prosecutors maintain that Mounir El Motassadeq knew about and helped the September 11 hijackers, his lawyers plan to argue in court there are no legal grounds for branding him as a member of a terrorist organisation. They also point out that he has already been freed from jail by Germany's supreme court pending the appeal. "The defence wants to achieve of course an overruling of the verdict in his favour, based on formal errors and possible material errors," Ladislav Anisic, lawyer for the 32-year-old Motassadeq, told reporters. "The defence wants a new trial after the overruling and that he is then acquitted," he added. Hearings in Motassadeq's appeal began at the Federal Court of Justice in Karlsruhe, Germany. Anisic said it was unlikely that a decision would come on the first day. A decision by Germany's highest court of appeals is likely to take several weeks, since the proceedings will focus on complicated, technical legal questions. Motassadeq was convicted last year on charges of belonging to a terrorist organisation but was unexpectedly freed from a Hamburg prison in February after the Constitutional Court upheld a defence motion that he be released pending his appeal. Motassadeq is one of only a handful of men to have gone on trial in connection with the September 11 attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people in 2001. It took prosecutors two long trials to get a conviction, albeit on the lesser of two charges. While finding him guilty of belonging to a terrorist group, the judges found Motassadeq -- a friend of three of the hijackers who were based in Hamburg -- knew too little of their plans to convict him on a second charge of abetting mass murder. They found Motassadeq was only a lower-tier member of the group of radical Arab students led by Mohamed Atta, who rammed the first hijacked plane into New York's World Trade Center. Not even Motassadeq's lawyers question that their client provided support to members of the Hamburg-based al Qaeda cell that planned and carried out the hijackings. But they dispute that Motassadeq was aware of the hijackers' plans and that he was a member of any terrorist group, an argument they hope will get his conviction overturned. Prosecutors, on the other hand, are expected to argue that Motassadeq was not only a member of a terrorist organisation but was aware that the Hamburg al Qaeda cell was planning to hijack airplanes and turn them into weapons of mass murder. "We believe that the accused should have been convicted of aiding and abetting 3,115 cases of murder," public prosecutor Gerhard Altvater told reporters in Karlsruhe.

ITN Source | October 12, 2006

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