25/05/2005
A court in Hamburg, Germany, has been denied testimony from Zacarias Moussaoui in the retrial of a Moroccan man accused of helping the September 11 suicide pilots, the judge hearing the case said today.
Lawyers for Mounir el Motassadeq had sought an appearance by Moussaoui, who pleaded guilty in the US last month to six counts of conspiring with the hijackers. However, presiding Judge Ernst-Rainer Schudt said Moussaoui’s lawyers had rejected the request.
The refusal, he said, was accompanied by a letter from the US Justice Department with summaries of the interrogation of two al Qaida suspects in US custody, Ramzi Binalshibh and Mohamedou Ould Slahi, which the court was expected to hear later today. The Hamburg court said it received the summaries earlier this month after repeated requests for further information from Washington. US authorities made clear they don’t intend to provide further evidence or witness testimony, the court said. “This letter constitutes the final response to all outstanding requests for legal assistance,” Schudt quoted the letter as saying. It also said the FBI had searched through its documents for any further information on el Motassadeq not yet given to German authorities and found none. El Motassadeq, 31, is being retried on more than 3,000 counts of accessory to murder and membership in a terrorist organisation on suspicion he provided logistical support for suicide hijackers Mohamed Atta, Marwan al-Shehhi and Ziad Jarrah. He was convicted in 2003 on the same charges and sentenced to the maximum 15 years, but an appeals court threw out the conviction last year and ordered a retrial. It ruled he had been unfairly denied testimony by key al Qaida suspects in US custody. When el Motassadeq’s retrial opened in August, the US Justice Department supplied summaries of the interrogations of Binalshibh – a Yemeni believed to have acted as al Qaida’s liaison with the Hamburg cell – and Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, thought to have masterminded the attacks. Ould Slahi, a Mauritanian, is suspected to have been an al Qaida contact in Germany. An FBI agent was also sent along with a member of the September 11 Commission to testify in the Hamburg court. El Motassadeq says he was close friends with Atta and others in the group, but did not know of their plans to attack the US. That assertion was backed by Binalshibh and Mohammed in the transcripts provided last year, but the Justice Department cited “inconsistencies by at least one of the individuals” and cautioned that they may have been trying “to influence as well as inform.” SOURCE: The Scotsman |
