Friend of 9/11 hijackers guilty of aiding plot

BERLIN —  Germany’s highest criminal court Thursday found a Moroccan man with close ties to the Sept. 11 hijackers guilty of being an accessory to mass murder in a case marked by overturned verdicts, frustrated prosecutors and diplomatic strains between Washington and Berlin.

The Federal Court of Justice in Karlsruhe reversed a lower court ruling that found Mounir Motassadeq guilty only of belonging to a terrorist organization. The new finding by presiding Judge Klaus Tolksdorf widened that conviction to include being an accessory to the Sept. 11 crime. The sentence carries a maximum jail term of 15 years.

In announcing the decision, Tolksdorf said that Motassadeq assisted the hijackers in carrying out the attacks “by making it easier and supporting them.” The judge added that the accused “knew that one or more planes would be hijacked and crashed.”

Ladislav Anisic, a lawyer for Motassadeq, said his client might appeal to Germany’s constitutional court and the European Court of Justice.

Motassadeq was a student at Hamburg University and a friend of several hijackers, including Mohamed Atta. He was accused of looking after apartments and arranging money transfers and other logistics for the plotters. Motassadeq, 32, who trained in a terrorist camp in Afghanistan, acknowledged that he knew Atta but denied knowledge of the Sept. 11 plan.

The case has bounced through the courts for years, revealing the legal complexities of prosecuting suspected terrorists. In 2003, the father of two became the first person convicted as an accessory to murder in the Sept. 11 attacks. But the verdict was overturned a year later when appellate judges complained that U.S. intelligence officials had withheld witnesses and information related to Motassadeq’s case.

In 2005, he was sentenced in a Hamburg court to seven years in prison for belonging to a terrorist organization. U.S. intelligence did not provide witnesses in that trial, but the Justice Department reportedly shared summaries of interrogations of alleged Al Qaeda mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and Ramzi Binalshibh, the alleged liaison between the terrorist network and the hijackers.

Both Motassadeq and prosecutors appealed the 2005 ruling. Prosecutors argued that the defendant knew the hijackers were planning to crash airplanes into the World Trade Center. The attacks in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania killed nearly 3,000 people.

Tolksdorf ruled Thursday that Motassadeq might have been unaware of the breadth of the plan but was an accessory to 246 murders -- the number of crew members and passengers on the doomed flights.

“There is no doubt that the defendant deliberately helped with the murder of these victims,” the court said in a statement. “He cannot escape judicial responsibility [just] because the assassins killed many more people than he could have imagined.”

Abdelghani Mzoudi, a friend of Motassadeq’s, was acquitted of the same charges in 2004. Motassadeq’s lawyers said they again will seek to question Binalshibh, who is at the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, saying he could clear their client.

Failing to win or hold a major conviction in the case had become an embarrassment for prosecutors. Gerhard Altvater of the federal prosecutor’s office said he was happy “that the state of justice offers enough tools to manage even such extraordinary crimes as this one.”

The case now returns to the Hamburg court, which will decide sentencing.

jeffrey.fleishman@latimes.com