Terrorist to Be Sentenced
January 5, 2007
Security will be tight on Thursday at the courthouse in Hamburg where Motassadeq, 32, was convicted in 2005 on terrorism charges and sentenced to seven years in jail.
A Moroccan living in Hamburg, Motassadeq was part of a circle that included Mohammed Atta and two other hijackers who carried out the 2001 suicide attacks in New York and Washington which killed more than 3,000 people. In November, Motassadeq was convicted on a further 246 counts of accessory to murder following an appeal.
After two full-scale trials and two appeals, Motassadeq will this time only face an abbreviated trial on five hearing days stretching into February to determine a suitable punishment for assisting the killings of the hijack victims.
Ladislav Anisic, a lawyer representing Motassadeq, has predicted that the trial will be quick.
"They'll be over and done with in three days," he said.
The Hamburg judges, who do not have the power to question the conviction, are expected to increase the seven-year term.
Long-running legal saga
The long-running legal saga has hinged on how much Motassadeq, who had been studying electrical engineering in Germany, could have known about the plans of his friends, led by pilot Atta, who crashed one passenger jet into the World Trade Center.
The trial court ruled that Motassadeq was part of the terrorist cell, and the appeal judges added that he must have known in advance that all the occupants of the four hijacked planes would be killed.
Only one other accessory to the attacks, Zacarias Moussaoui, also of Moroccan descent, has been tried. A US court sentenced him to life in jail in May last year. Several other alleged conspirators who were not among the 19 suicide attackers are still at large or in custody but have not yet been tried.
How much did he know?
Motassadeq's odyssey through the courts began with his October 2001 arrest, after German police uncovered his association with Atta. He was given the maximum 15-year sentence in 2003. But that verdict was overturned in 2004 because US authorities had refused to allow the court to question top al-Qaeda suspects in US custody.
At a retrial which ended in August 2005, the court found no evidence that Motassadeq had been directly involved in the attacks. But he was found to have handled the hijackers' bank transfers and to have covered up their whereabouts.
Much of the legal argument over his case was about whether in conversations with Atta he could have foreseen the extraordinary damage the attacks could inflict, with two of the world's highest buildings collapsing.
Later comments by al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden suggested that even the terrorist kingpin did not realize that the fires caused by the crashed jets would melt the steel frames of the World Trade Center towers in New York.
Motassadeq, who is married with at least one child, has spent long periods free on bail in Hamburg, but was barred from resuming his studies. German authorities plan to expel him after his jail term.
Germany grapples with legal challenges
Germany has tightened its anti-terrorism laws and boosted surveillance of militant Islamists since the Sept. 11 attacks, in which three of the hijackers were Arab students who had been living in Hamburg.
Despite those measures, German judges have not had an easy time interpreting the evidence and putting terror convicts behind bars.
Abdel-Ghani Mzoudi, another associate of the terrorists who lived in Hamburg, was acquitted on similar evidence to that brought against Motassadeq and subsequently went home to Morocco. Both Mzoudi and Motassadeq were radical Islamists who had trained in al-Qaeda camps in Afghanistan, then returned to Hamburg.
German authorities gave up trying to imprison other associates. An inquiry against Mamoun Darkanzali, a Syrian-born Hamburg trader, was abandoned last year for lack of evidence, though he knew the Hamburg terrorist and had business dealings with bin Laden's group.
Another Syrian-born man, Mohammad Haidar Sammar, allegedly recruited the Hamburg attackers to al Qaeda. German police questioned but did not arrest him. He is now in Syrian custody awaiting trial.
Christian Ganczarski, a German who converted to Islam, is currently in French custody. German authorities said his close contacts to bin Laden were insufficient to lead to charges under German law.