Sept. 11 Case

A Hamburg court on Monday handed Mounir el Motassadeq the maximum 15-year sentence for his role in aiding the hijackers who killed nearly 3,000 people in the United States on Sept. 11, 2001.

Prosecutor Walter Hemberger said Monday that Motassadeq, who was friendly with three of the suicide attackers when they were students in the northern German city of Hamburg, deserved the toughest sentence possible under German law because he had committed "an immense wrong."

Hemberger's comments came after Motassadeq's lawyers filed a series of motions to halt the sentencing hearing. They argued that the Hamburg bench was "unconstitutional" and demanded a suspension of the sentencing.

However, the judges rejected the challenges and pushed ahead with the hearing, saying they wanted to finish the case Monday. The sentencing court, comprising three Hamburg state superior court judges, had convened on Friday.

Marathon legal process

The sentencing brings to a close a marathon legal process which has seen Motassadeq in and out of German courts for five years.

The bearded 32-year-old Moroccan was arrested a few months after the Sept 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington that killed nearly 3,000 people.

In 2003, he became the first person ever to be convicted for a role in the attacks. He was then sentenced to 15 years in prison for being an accessory to mass murder.

But the German federal court in Karlsruhe, in southwestern Germany, overturned that verdict on the grounds that US authorities had refused to allow the court to question top al Qaeda suspects held in US custody. It ordered a retrial in Hamburg.

In 2005, Motassadeq was given a seven-year prison sentence for the lesser crime of belonging to a terrorist organisation but was cleared of abetting mass murder. The judges found there was no evidence to show that Motassadeq had been directly involved in planning the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

But he was found to have handled bank transfers for members of the Hamburg-based terror cell which included the presumed ringleader Mohammed Atta -- while the future hijackers were pursuing flight training in the United States -- and to have helped cover up their tracks.

Motassadeq says he's innocent

That verdict was scrapped in November last year, when the Karlsruhe court found that Motassadeq had "facilitated and supported the attacks" and sent him for sentencing. Prosecutors successfully argued that under a "division of labor" within the group, Motassadeq ran the financial affairs of other cell members and covered up their absences from Germany before the attacks.

Motassadeq's lawyers however maintain he was a low-tier member of the group and that he knew nothing about the plot to fly planes into targets in New York and Washington.

Last Friday, Motassadeq vehemently protested his innocence, telling the court: "I swear before God that I did not know that they were in America. I swear before God that I did not know what they were planning."

German authorities have indicated that they will deport Motassadeq to Morocco once he has served his sentence.

Motassadeq's case and the perceived failure of German courts to successfully prosecute him have strained Berlin's ties with Washington in recent years.

Motassadeq is only the second man to be convicted of a role in the Sept. 11 attacks. Zacarias Moussaoui, a French citizen of Moroccan descent who received a life sentence from a US court in May 2006, is the only other person convicted of links to the attacks.