UNBELIEVABLE!!! 15 years for 9/11 conspirator
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TV ClubHouse: Archives: 2003 February: UNBELIEVABLE!!! 15 years for 9/11 conspirator

Kaili

Wednesday, February 19, 2003 - 07:40 am EditMoveDeleteIP
HAMBURG, Germany -- A German court has jailed a Moroccan man for 15 years after convicting him of aiding the September 11 suicide hijackers in the first trial anywhere of a suspected attack conspirator.

Mounir el Motassadeq, a 28-year-old electrical engineering student, was found guilty of being an accessory to more than 3,000 murders in New York and Washington and being a member of a terrorist organisation.

CNN's Matthew Chance said the 15-year sentence is the maximum the court could impose under German law for being an accomplice to murder -- even if those murdered are numbered in the thousands.

Much of the evidence was circumstantial and he was convicted by association with other al Qaeda members and not by direct evidence, Chance said.

In addition to the 3,000-plus counts of accessory to murder, he was convicted of five counts of attempted murder and bodily injury.

Prosecutors alleged he provided logistical support for the Hamburg al Qaeda cell that included lead hijacker Mohamed Atta, who piloted one of the two airliners that crashed into the World Trade Center.

Police blocked off the street in front of the Hamburg courthouse on Wednesday morning as dozens of journalists queued for tight security screening to enter the building.

El Motassadeq consistently denied the charges during his three-and-a-half-month trial and his lawyers were seeking an acquittal from the five-judge panel.


El Motassadeq admits knowing the alleged leader of the al Qaeda plot, Mohamed Atta.
But Judge Albrecht Mentz sided with prosecutors' argument that a complex mosaic of evidence proved the defendant was "a cog that kept the machinery going."

"The accused belonged to this group since its inception," Mentz said in reading the verdict. "He knew and approved the key elements of the planned attacks."

During the trial the defendant acknowledged he knew the six other alleged members of the Hamburg cell -- Atta plus two other pilots of the airliners, Ziad Jarrah and Marwan al-Shehhi; and logisticians Ramzi Binalshibh, Said Bahaji and Zakariya Essabar.

Of Atta, the Moroccan told CNN shortly before his arrest in the fall of 2001: "We visited each other, talked like normal friends."

But he said he knew nothing of the plans for September 11.

"I couldn't believe that people I knew could do something like that," el Motassadeq said in his closing statement last week. "I watched it on television and I was shocked ... I can only hope that something like September 11 never happens again."

But witnesses testified that el Motassadeq, a slight, bearded man -- who showed no emotion as the verdict was read out and listened attentively as the judge gave his explanation -- was as radical as the rest of the group, talking of jihad (holy war) and his hatred of Israel and the United States.

The defendant himself admitted training in a camp run by Osama bin Laden -- the al Qaeda chief alleged by the U.S. to be the mastermind of the September 11 attacks -- in Afghanistan in 2000.


Prosecutors allege el Motassadeq provided logistical support for the World Trade Center attacks.
Prosecutors alleged el Motassadeq used his power of attorney over al-Shehhi's bank account to pay rent, tuition and utility bills, allowing the plotters to keep up the appearance of being normal students in Germany.

El Motassadeq argued he was simply providing an innocent service to friends and that he took weapons training in Afghanistan because he believed all Muslims should learn to shoot.

The defence tried several times unsuccessfully to obtain testimony by two of el Motassadeq's friends, Ramzi Binalshibh and Mohammed Haydar Zammar -- a lack of evidence that the lawyers say could be grounds for an appeal in case of a guilty verdict.

Binalshibh, a Yemeni suspect in U.S. custody, is believed to have been the Hamburg cell's key contact with al Qaeda. Zammar, an alleged al Qaeda recruiter in Hamburg, is in prison in Syria.

The court failed to get the men released to testify and German authorities refused to turn over their files on the two, saying transcripts of their interrogations were provided to them on condition they only be used for intelligence purposes.

Motassadeq, a member of a middle-class family, came to Germany in 1993 to study. By 1995, he was studying electrical engineering in Hamburg, where he is believed to have first met Atta no later than the following year.

Lawyers representing Americans who lost family members on September 11 had said they would appeal if el Motassadeq did not receive close to the maximum sentence. Family members are allowed to be co-plaintiffs under German law.

Family members of American victims became co-plaintiffs and testified in court, including Stephen Push, who lost his his wife in the September 11 attack on New York.

"One of the most disturbing things about the case was the discovery that the German authorities knew much about this al Qaeda cell years prior to the September 11 attack," he told CNN.

"Just like the authorities in the United States -- the FBI and CIA -- they were aware of some of these individuals, have been tracking them and yet were not able to connect the dots, were not able to use that information to prevent the attacks."

Kaili

Wednesday, February 19, 2003 - 07:42 am EditMoveDeleteIP
Maybe this should be a hot topic, but when you are decided to be guilty of accessory to over 3,000 murders- is 15 years really enough? I can't even imagine the outrage people are going to have...

Squaredsc

Wednesday, February 19, 2003 - 07:57 am EditMoveDeleteIP
well it is their law. of course im sure their prisons aren't the country clubs that they have over here, imo.

Kaili

Wednesday, February 19, 2003 - 08:04 am EditMoveDeleteIP
Yeah, I have to admit I only read the headline before I posted it I'm a big dummy- gotta go stand in the corner for jumping to conclusions.

I got all heated up thinking that it was the guy WE have is custody and that an American court only gave him 15 years. I was shocked. So much for that... I read further into it now. Oops.

That's a really, really low maximum sentence.

Kaili

Wednesday, February 19, 2003 - 08:09 am EditMoveDeleteIP
I guess this isn't that exciting...

Hello out there? Moderator people? Can this be moved just into Breaking News as a message? Maybe even without the whole long article? The link to the article is 15 Years For 9/11 Conspirator
but it's all over all the news sites anyway.

Mack

Wednesday, February 19, 2003 - 01:02 pm EditMoveDeleteIP
Also understand that in Germany, unless things have changed since I lived there in the late 80's, this fellow will serve 15 years. The idea of time off for good behavior isn't really applied in Germany. In fact, the expectation is that you'll be on good behavior all the time and any bad behavior is added on to the 15 years. As prisons go German prison aren't so bad but they're also not like our "white collar" crime medium security prison either. Tennis, television and a sauna are not a part of the facilities.