HAMBURG, 6 February 2004 — A German court yesterday cleared a Moroccan student of being an accessory to murder in the Sept. 11 attacks in the United States, saying the evidence against him was not strong enough for a conviction.
The accused, Abdelghani Mzoudi, was also cleared on a lesser charge of membership of a terrorist organization by the high-security court in Hamburg, northern Germany, after only the second trial worldwide of the 2001 suicide hijackings.
“Mr. Mzoudi you are acquitted. But this is not a reason to be jubilant,” said presiding judge Klaus Ruehle, after he had rejected a last-minute challenge from a lawyer representing the families of some of the victims.
The 31-year-old student, with a full beard and wearing a patterned sweater, showed no immediate reaction when the verdict was handed down. Ruehle said the court reached its decision not “because it was convinced of the innocence of the accused, but because there was not enough evidence for a conviction.”
“It appears that some of the preparation of the attacks was not hidden from you. However, the opposite is also possible,” he said, adding that he ruled “when in doubt, in favor of the accused.” Referring to the lack of evidence, the judge conceded that it was not easy for investigators to probe terrorist cases and that “the threat of international terrorism continues.” The judge went into Mzoudi’s background in Hamburg, where the accused became involved in an increasingly radicalized group of Muslims centered around the Egyptian Mohammed Atta, the alleged ringleader of the suicide pilots.
He said the group included two other pilots — Ziad Jarrah of Lebanon, Marwan Al-Shehhi of the United Arab Emirates -- and Ramzi Binalshibh, who is in US custody and regarded as a top Al-Qaeda operative.
Ruehle said their ethos was “hatred of Jews. America was the enemy of Islam.”
He said the four went in 1999 to an Al-Qaeda camp in Afghanistan. Mzoudi and another alleged member of the group, Zakariya Essabar, followed them in 2000.But the judge said: “The evidence has not proved that the accused was drawn by Atta or the others into planning the attacks.”
Ruehle also said that the Hamburg group’s general hatred against Jews and the United States “is not sufficient for it to be a terrorist organization.” He added: “Such radical groups must be confronted with other means. People with radical views are widespread. They are not all terrorists.”
When the hearing opened, the lawyer, Andreas Schulz, urged the court to make a new attempt to obtain evidence from a key witness, thought to be Binalshibh, despite earlier refusals by the US authorities to allow any testimony. He claimed the US attitude was softening and that an upcoming trial in the United States of another suspect over the 2001 attacks could open the way for the evidence to be used.
Ruehle made clear his skepticism over the submission after Schulz said he could not divulge the source of some of his information, and chief prosecutor Walter Hemberger also said he was unaware of any shift in attitude by US authorities.
Mzoudi was accused of more than 3,000 counts of being an accessory to murder — a number based on the death toll in the suicide jet strikes on US cities — as well as membership of a terrorist organization. He could have faced up to 15 years in jail if convicted. Mzoudi was also a roommate of Mounir El Motassadeq, a 29-year-old Moroccan, who in February became the first person to be convicted of involvement in the Sept. 11 attacks on the same charges and in the same court.
