DUESSELDORF, Germany, 25 June 2003 — A man who claimed he was a bodyguard for Al-Qaeda chief Osama Bin Laden stood trial amid tight security yesterday on charges of plotting extremist attacks in Germany.
Armed police sealed off roads and adopted a heavy presence in and near the court in Duesseldorf, western Germany, because of fears for the safety of the accused, Shadi Mohd Mustafa Abdellah.
He told yesterday’s opening day that he was ready to provide more information about his ties to the network behind the deadly Sept. 11, 2001 attacks in the United States.
Abdellah has already “made extensive admissions” since his arrest, federal prosecutor Dirk Fernholz said.
The information is believed to center on Islamists operating in Germany.
Presiding judge Ottmar Breidling told the 26-year-old defendant that he was surrounded by “the highest security level.”
Prosecutors claim Abdellah, a Jordanian of Palestinian origin, is a member of Al-Tawhid, a group described as supporting Al-Qaeda’s campaign against the United States and its allies.
Al-Tawhid’s operational leader was Abu Mussab Al-Zarqawi, an alleged senior Al-Qaeda figure, according to the prosecution team.
Abdellah had testified in November at the trial of Mounir El-Motassadeq, a Moroccan convicted by a German court earlier this year of being an accessory to murder over the Sept. 11 suicide plane attacks.
He told the Motassadeq trial that he had spent a total one and a half years in Afghanistan until May 2001. After 20 days in a training camp, he worked briefly as a bodyguard for Bin Laden.
In his testimony in the Motassadeq case, Abdellah said Bin Laden once told members of a training camp in Afghanistan that “we want to hit America in the spinal column.”
He also said that on a separate occasion, six months before the attacks, he heard the Al-Qaeda leader boast that there would be “thousands of dead” in the United States.
Motassadeq was later jailed for the maximum 15 years.
In Duesseldorf, Fernholz said Abdellah was part of an Al-Tawhid group which had plotted to attack Jewish and Israeli targets in Germany.
Members initially focused on collecting money and smuggling activists, but gradually, at Zarqawi’s urging, they developed plans for a gun attack on a populated square in a German city.
