GERMANY: The world's first September 11th trial ended yesterday when a Hamburg court sentenced a Moroccan man to 15 years in prison for his part in the plot.
Mounir El Motassadeq, a 28- year-old student, was given the maximum possible sentence after the court ruled he was a key member of the Hamburg terrorist cell behind the attacks and had acted as an accessory to the murder of the 3,066 people who died in the attacks.
"The accused belonged to the group of Arab-Muslim students who planned the attacks out of hatred for the United States and Israel," presiding Judge Albrecht Mentz said to a packed courtroom yesterday. "They wanted to strike at the foundations of the United States with this attack of unprecedented dimensions." Motassadeq, a small, bearded man wearing cream trousers and a striped shirt, reacted impassively as the judge read out the verdict. Later he shook his head, smiled and even glanced at his watch.
He admitted he trained at an al-Qaeda camp in Afghanistan and said he was a close friend of Muhammad Atta, who, US authorities believe, crashed the first plane into the World Trade Centre.
However, he denied he knew anything of the September 11th plans during the trial, which has taken place under extremely high security in a Hamburg courtroom since last October.
The defendant, married with two children, moved to Germany in 1993 and told the court he was a religious, peace-loving man. He said he was horrified by the September 11th attacks and said that "violence was never the answer".
However, the court accepted prosecution evidence that the defendant signed the will of Muhammad Atta and arranged money to pay for flying lessons by having access to the bank account of Marwan Al Shehi, the man believed to have piloted the second plane into the World Trade Centre.
Prosecutors argued that the defendant "had a radical Islamic attitude and sacrificed himself to an ideology that despises humanity." The five-judge court agreed yesterday, ruling that the defendant "knew about the preparations for the attack and supported the planning."
Lawyers for the defence had demanded an acquittal, saying the evidence gathered was circumstantial. Mr Hartmut Jacobi, the defence lawyer, announced an appeal, saying the prosecution case was based on "conjecture, claims and interpretation".
He tried unsuccessfully to get two friends of the defendant to testify as defence witnesses. One man, Ramzi Binalshibh, is believed to have been the Hamburg cell's contact with al-Qaeda and is in US custody.
The other, Muhammad Haydar Zammar, is an alleged al-Qaeda recruiter in Hamburg and is currently in prison in Syria.
Neither Syria nor the US allowed the men to testify, while German authorities declined to release their files on the men to the court, saying they contained privileged intelligence information.
The 29-day court case was the first of its kind and provided the first glimpse into the workings of an al-Qaeda terrorist cell. The ruling came as a relief to German authorities, who were shocked after September 11th to learn that the attacks were planned under their noses in Hamburg.
"This is a success in the fight against international terrorism," Mr Otto Schily, the Interior Minister, said. Judge Mentz said the court had decided to impose the maximum sentence after hearing the emotional testimony of victims' relatives.
