BERLIN, 25 November 2005 — Germany unveiled a draft law yesterday to speed up extraditions to and from European Union states, reviving prospects for the handover of a suspected Al-Qaeda financier to Spain. The accused man, Mamoun Darkazanli, walked free in July after Germany’s highest court dealt the government an embarrassing blow by ruling the previous law unconstitutional.
Justice Minister Brigitte Zypries said the new draft addressed the court’s concerns and would make it possible for Germany to extradite suspects under EU arrest warrants, one of the bloc’s most important security initiatives since the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States. The warrants were introduced last year to boost anti-terrorism cooperation.
Zypries said the measure should become law in Germany early next year and Spain would then need to issue a new EU warrant if it still wanted Darkazanli handed over.
As he has German as well as Syrian citizenship, a German court would have to decide under the new law whether he should be extradited.
“The court must check whether the crime has a material connection to Germany, in which case extradition would not be allowed, or whether there is a material foreign connection, and then extradition would be permitted,” Zypries said. Darkazanli, 47, was one of 35 people charged by a Spanish judge in 2003 with belonging to Al-Qaeda. A Madrid court convicted 18 of them in September in Europe’s biggest trial of Islamist militants.
He has been accused by the United States of financing Osama Bin Laden’s network and appears on the United Nations sanctions list of individuals linked to Al-Qaeda. Blacklisted suspects are banned from traveling abroad or possessing arms, and UN member states are obliged to freeze their assets.
German authorities have been investigating him for the past four years for links to the Hamburg cell that led the Sept. 11 attacks, but so far they have found insufficient evidence to bring a case against him. The Spanish charges against him include carrying out “logistics support and financing activity” for Al-Qaeda, including the purchase of a cargo vessel for Bin Laden in 1993.
