Germany Charges the Second Man Linked to September 11 Attacks

Agence France-Presse
August 29, 2002

German authorities said they had charged a Moroccan man with complicity in the September 11 attacks, only the second person to be indicted worldwide, and had evidence the suicide-hijackings were planned almost two years in advance.

Federal prosecutor Kay Nehm said Mounir El Motassadeq was accused of belonging to a terrorist organisation and of at least 3,116 counts of assisting in murder.

Motassadeq is the first person to be charged over the attacks in Europe and the second after Zacarias Moussaoui, who is due to face court in the United States in January following his arrest in August 2001 on immigration violations.

Speaking at a press conference, Nehm said Motassadeq had managed a bank account for Marwan Al-Shehhi, one of the hijackers, and explained how Shehhi had boasted of attacking the United States to a Hamburg librarian.

"There will be thousands of dead. You will think of me," Shehhi told the librarian in April or May of 2000, according to Nehm.

New York's World Trade Center was mentioned in the conversation, he added. Investigators said shortly after the attacks that perhaps years of planning had gone into them.

He described Motassadeq, as a "substantial cog" in the preparation of the attacks, in which hijacked passenger planes crashed into the twin towers, the Pentagon in Washington and a field in Pennsylvania, killing more than 3,000 people.

The 28-year-old Moroccan was officially charged on Wednesday with helping members of the Hamburg cell of Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda network, accusations that he has fiercely denied.

But Nehm said the attacks would probably not have succeeded without the help of Motassadeq, who he claimed had been seen at a terrorist training camp near Kandahar in Afghanistan between May and August 2000.

"The Hamburg cell was part of an international network of Muslim fundamentalists who were ready to commit violent acts," he said.

"Apart from ideological and military training courses, such stays served above all to coordinate details of the attacks and logistic support with the people responsible for the international network", he said.

He said the cell had begun to consider attacking the United States with aircraft as early as October 1999.

Nehm did not say when Motassadeq would face trial, but sources said he could appear before a Hamburg court in October.

He is alleged to have managed an account at a Hamburg bank for Shehhi, a United Arab Emirates national, who then used the money to pay for trips to the United States and for flying lessons in Florida.

The two men shared an apartment for years in Hamburg with the Egyptian Mohammad Atta, who is believed to have been the mastermind behind the attacks, without coming to the attention of the authorities.

Nehm said Motassadeq, who had studied electronics at a Hamburg technical college, made contact with Atta in 1995 or 1996.

Atta, 33, studied at the college from 1992 to 2001. The FBI believes he hijacked and flew a passenger aircraft into one of the twin towers in New York. Shehhi is believed to have piloted another plane into the second tower.

Moussaoui, a 34-year-old French national dubbed the 20th hijacker, will answer six charges over the attacks -- four of which carry a possible death penalty -- when he faces a court near Washington on January 6.

Meanwhile in Detroit, authorities charged five Arab men and an Islamic activist in the western city of Seattle with conspiring to support al-Qaeda, amid growing pressure to show results in the investigation of the attacks.

A grand jury accused Karim Koubriti, Ahmed Hannan, Youssef Hmimssa, Farouk Ali-Haimoud and a fifth man known only as Abdella of conspiring to support al-Qaeda and documents fraud in a four-count indictment.

The men are suspected of being members of a covert "sleeper" cell of Islamic militants who planned and scouted targets for possible terror attacks.

© AFP 2002

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