Friend of 9/11 plotters sentenced as terrorist

BERLIN – A Moroccan with links to the Sept. 11 hijackers was sentenced to seven years in prison Friday for belonging to a terrorist organization, but a German court found he was not involved in the plot that killed nearly 3,000 people.

The verdict came in the retrial of Mounir Motassadeq, 31, a former Hamburg university student and friend of Mohamed Atta and two other hijackers. In 2003, Motassadeq was the first person convicted in the Sept. 11 attacks. But the case was overturned by an appeals court that ruled he was denied access to testimony of alleged al-Qaida operatives in U.S. custody.

The legal drama strained relations between Washington, D.C., and the German court system and underscored one of the difficulties in the war on terrorism: granting a suspect a fair trial while not divulging intelligence that could jeopardize other investigations. This conundrum further angered German prosecutors last year when Motassadeq’s friend, Abdelghani Mzoudi, was acquitted of similar charges after the U.S. government refused to turn over information.

The U.S. Justice Department would not provide witnesses in its custody but reportedly shared summaries of interrogations done on al-Qaida mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and Ramzi Binalshibh, the alleged liaison between al-Qaida and the hijackers.

The summaries indicated that Motassadeq was unaware of the plot, but the German court was frustrated by the lack of details and evidence it was presented. The court also was troubled that the information might have been induced by torture, which would make it inadmissible under German law.

“How are we supposed to do justice to our task when important documents are withheld from us?” Judge Ernst-Rainer Schudt, presiding over the Hamburg court, said from the bench. He added: “It’s an unsatisfactory situation.”

Motassadeq, the first person convicted as an accessory to the attacks, originally was sentenced to 15 years in prison 2003. On Friday, he was found guilty of a lesser charge of belonging to a terrorist organization.