German lawyers defending a Moroccan man on trial for aiding the September 11th suicide hijackers demanded his acquittal this morning.
Mr Abdelghani Mzoudi (31) is charged with several thousand counts of aiding and abetting murder and membership of a terrorist organisation - the Hamburg al-Qaeda cell instrumental in the attacks on US targets in 2001 that killed some 3,000 people.
Summing up the defence case, lawyer Gul Tinar told the Hamburg court that Mr Mzoudi had been left in the dark about the attack plans. "Federal prosecutors have no evidence," she said.
In a surprise move last month, Mr Mzoudi was freed after German investigators informed the court of secret testimony presumed to come from a captured al-Qaeda leader suggesting the Moroccan did not belong to the core group of Hamburg plotters.
Despite this new evidence, prosecutors last week demanded the court find Mr Mzoudi guilty and hand him the maximum sentence of 15 years in prison.
Last year, the same court sentenced another Moroccan, Mounir El Motassadeq, to 15 years after finding him guilty on similar charges to those Mzoudi faces. Motassadeq was the first person convicted anywhere for the September 11th attacks.