2ND Germany arrests convicted terrorist Motassadeq

dpa German Press Agency
Published: Tuesday November 28, 2006

Hamburg- German police detained convicted terrorist Mounir
al-Motassadeq, 32, in Hamburg Friday when judges cancelled his bail,
one day after he was found guilty of assisting the September 11, 2001
attacks on the United States.
Motassadeq, a Moroccan student, had been free on bail, but under
police monitoring, since February as the German courts reviewed his
case. He had been given seven years in jail last year for being a
member of the Hamburg terrorist cell that provided three 9/11 pilots.

On Thursday, German High Court judges added a second conviction:
for being an accessory to the murder of 246 occupants of the hijacked
planes that crashed in New York, Washington DC and Pennsylvania.

Rivalries between German federal and state courts were evident
Friday as state judges in the northern city of Hamburg stubbornly
refused to order the Moroccan Islamist into jail. Instead the order
came from the federal justice capital of Karlsruhe.

"He was picked up at his Hamburg apartment without any
difficulty," said a police source in Hamburg. Motassadeq has been in
and out of Hamburg jails since he was first detained the month after
the 2001 attacks, when he claimed he had no foreknowledge of the
strikes.

Judges in Karlsruhe said the fact that Motassadeq's wife and
offspring had left Germany for Morocco created an increased risk that
he would try to flee Germany before a sentencing hearing that was
likely to be "to his disadvantage."

Two panels of Hamburg judges had earlier said Motassadeq could be
trusted because he had always observed bail conditions in the past.
His lawyer, Ladislav Anicic, told the website Spiegel Online that his
client had no intention of running away.

As a close friend of Mohammed Atta and other pilots and a graduate
of an al-Qaeda Afghan training camp, he was convicted last year of
membership in a terrorist cell. On Thursday he was found guilty of an
actual role in 9/11 because he also covered the plotters' tracks.

© 2006 - dpa German Press Agency