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| Belgian Appeal For Qaeda Militant |
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19/02/2004
Belgian Appeal For Alleged al-Qaeda Militant to Open Thursday
BRUSSELS : An appeal by alleged Al-Qaeda militant Nizar Trabelsi, sentenced last year to 10 years in prison over a foiled attack on a Belgian military base, will be heard by a Brussels court Thursday, judicial officials said.
Trabelsi, a former Tunisian football player and former drug addict, was convicted of plotting an attack on the Kleine Brogel army base housing US troops in northeast Belgium housing, around the time of the September 11 attacks in 2001.
He appealed alongside nine of the 18 alleged Islamic militants convicted in the original five-week trial which was held in May and June last year.
During the appeal, Trabelsi will stick to his statement that he planned a bomb attack against Kleine Brogel, his lawyers told AFP.
But attorneys Didier de Quevy and Fernande Motte-de Raedt said they would argue that admitting to a crime is no proof and that they would demand a suspended five-year prison sentence.
The original verdicts were handed down on September 30. Five defendants were acquitted. De Quevy said at the time the court did not take into account his regrets.
The suspects, whose trial was held amid unprecedented security, also faced charges linked to attempted terrorist attacks and the assassination of Afghan anti-Taliban commander Ahmad Shah Masood in 2001.
Trabelsi, who used to play for German league side Fortuna Duesseldorf and who went to Afghanistan to "live out his faith" in 2001, is the only defendant who has pleaded guilty in the case.
He said that in Afghanistan he was "traumatized by the fate granted to Muslims in the world" and said he found in Al-Qaeda head Osama bin Laden a father figure whom he had always sought.
Sent to Belgium in mid-2001 by the extremist organization after having undergone explosives training, he organized the purchase of bomb-making chemicals for the Kleine Brogel plot.
Three of Trabelsi's accomplices also appealed and their appeals will be heard alongside his.
The appeal court is also hearing the case of two other Islamists, sentenced for forging passports and visas so volunteers could be sent to Afghanistan more easily, as well as Amor Sliti, who was sentenced as an accomplice.
The public prosecutor has also appealed the cases of two other accused, one of them Tarek Maaroufi, described as the "spinal column" of a radical Islamic cell in Belgium.
Maaroufi, a Tunisian, was sentenced to six years in prison in October for activities linked to Islamic extremism.
A separate trial of Maaroufi and two other unidentified men, from Iraq and Morocco, for providing forged documents to a terrorist network operating from Antwerp will open at a Brussels court on March 22.
Trabelsi's appeal had originally been scheduled to open on Wednesday but the court delayed the first of eight planned hearings for a day when several detainees could not be taken to the courthouse because of a strike of Belgian police.
Hearings were expected to last until March 5.
SOURCE: AFP Via Channel News Asia
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