11 August 2004
HAMBURG - Lawyers for 11
September terror suspect Mounir El Motassadeq said Wednesday
they expect an acquittal for their client in the wake of evidence
provided by the US Justice Department asserting that he was not a
member of the cell which planned the attacks.
"I believe this is heading towards an acquittal," said Josef
Graessler-Muenscher, the chief defence attorney for Motassadeq at
the Hamburg Superior Court, where a re-trial of Motassedeq got
started on Tuesday.
Chief presiding judge Ernst-Rainer Schudt made a brief comment
indicating the impact it would have on the proceedings.
"We'll have to consider what can be drawn from this," he said about
the US Justice Department's evidence consisting of faxed excerpts
from interrogation transcripts of detained 11 September terror
suspects Ramzi Binalshibh and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed
According to the excerpts, the two men told
interrogators that Motassadeq was not a member of the Hamburg cell
and that he had no knowledge of the plot to commandeer jetliners
and fly them into buildings, according to the evidence placed
before the Hamburg court.
The stunning revelations came on the second day of Motassadeq's
retrial on charges of being an accessory to the deaths of the more
than 3,000 victims of the 9/11 attacks.
Motassadeq is the only man ever convicted in connection with the
terror attacks. The Hamburg court sentenced him to 15 years in
prison in early 2003 for being an accomplice in the murder of 3,066
persons in the September 11 attacks.
But in March 2004, Germany's Federal Supreme Court in Karlsruhe
quashed the conviction on a technicality and ordered a new trial,
saying essential evidence had been withheld by the US State
Department.
On Tuesday, Hamburg State Court Judge Ernst-Rainer Schudt said
federal prosecutors had received written notification of the US
decision to provide evidence only minutes before proceedings
began.
But the Justice Department stopped short of making Binalshibh and
Mohammed available to the court for testimony - a key demand of
both the prosecution and the defence. Instead, it provided edited
transcripts of interrogation records and other CIA documents.
Germany's top federal prosecutor had worked for months to persuade
the U.S. to hand over evidence that Germany's high court, which
ordered the retrial, has stated is crucial for conviction.
Chief Federal Prosecutor Kay Nehm travelled to the United States in
April seeking the release of interrogation records of detained
terror suspects Binalshibh and Mohammed.
He added that a 17-page document with questions German officials
want put to Binalshibh had been sent to the United States this
month.
The same Hamburg court that had convicted Motassadeq acquitted a
friend and co-suspect Abdel-Ghani Mzoudi, in February 2003. Mzoudi
had been tried on identical charges. The court cited the Supreme
Court ruling in handing down the acquittal.
Mzoudi's acquittal is now being appealed by the Federal
Prosecutor's Office.
Both men were student friends of the suicide pilots in Hamburg, and
evidence presented in court showed that they had been at al-Qaeda
camps in Afghanistan, but their lawyers argued that this did not
prove that they knew about the 11 September plot.
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