Sept. 11 Suspect Loses Appeal in Germany
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By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
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http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Germany-Sept-11-Trial.html?_r=1
<http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/world/AP-Germany-Sept-11-Trial.html?_r=1&or
ef=slogin> &oref=slogin
Published: May 11, 2007
Filed at 9:17 a.m. ET
BERLIN (AP) -- Germany's top criminal court on Friday said it had refused to
take up the appeal of a Moroccan man convicted of helping three of the Sept.
11 suicide pilots in their plot, leaving the 33-year-old with no further
legal action possible in the country.
Mounir el Motassadeq was convicted in November of being an accessory to the
murder of the 246 passengers and crew on the four jetliners used in the 2001
terrorist attacks.
He was sentenced to 15 years in prison, the maximum penalty possible under
German law, and the Federal Court of Justice said it found el Motassadeq's
appeal to be ''unfounded'' in a May 2 decision.
Germany's constitutional court in January had already refused to hear a
separate appeal in which el Motassadeq's attorneys claimed that evidence
from other terrorism suspects was not properly considered at his trial.
The decision Friday was a final step in what has been a long trip through
the German legal system that began when el Motassadeq was arrested two
months after the Sept. 11 attacks and has featured two full trials.
El Motassadeq's attorney Udo Jacob has said in the past that once he had
exhausted appeals in Germany he would consider taking the case to the
European Court for Human Rights.
El Motassadeq was first convicted and sentenced to the maximum 15 years in
prison in 2003, but that verdict was overturned by a federal court the
following year -- largely because of lack of evidence from al-Qaida suspects
in U.S. custody.
At a retrial in 2005, the U.S. provided limited summaries from the
interrogation of, among others, Ramzi Binalshibh, a suspected liaison
between the Hamburg hijackers and al-Qaida. The Hamburg court acquitted el
Motassadeq of direct involvement in the attacks, but sentenced him to seven
years for belonging to a terrorist group.
Prosecutors appealed the decision, and in November the Federal Court of
Justice ruled that evidence showed el Motassadeq was aware Hamburg-based
hijackers
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/a/mohamed_atta/i
ndex.html?inline=nyt-per> Mohamed Atta, Marwan al-Shehhi and Ziad Jarrah
planned to hijack and crash planes, even though he might not have known the
specifics of the plot. It convicted him of 246 counts of accessory to murder
in addition to the membership in a terrorist organization charge.
Judge Klaus Tolksdorf ruled then that el Motassadeq had helped ''watch the
attackers' backs and conceal them'' by doing things such as helping them
keep up the appearance of being regular university students -- paying
tuition and rent fees, and transferring money. Tolksdorf said it was
irrelevant to el Motassadeq's guilt whether he knew of the planned timing,
dimension or targets of the attacks.
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