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By Jochen Bittner

Translated By Hartmut Lau

August 18, 2005

Original Article (German)

Motassadeq Arrives in Court Friday

Hamburg: The defense attorney threw his hands into the air as if he wanted to embrace the entire high-security courtroom of the Superior Court of the State of Hamburg. Ladislav Anisic declares,"The fundamental principle of the rule of law, in dubio reo - when in doubt, decide for the accused - should be written in large letters here!" He meant to say, etched above the benches occupied by the red-robed federal prosecutors, as guidance.  As a warning to the five judges sitting in the 4^th Chamber of the Criminal Court, and, above all, as protection for his client, 31 year old Mounir al-Motassadeq, accused in the greatest terror attack of all time.

The prosecutors accuse the Moroccan of 3,066 counts of accessory to murder and, in addition, of being a member of a terrorist organization - the "Atta Group" as Federal prosecutor Walter Hemberger called it today. He is referring to the group of young Muslim students from Hamburg-Harburg that went forth on September 11, 2001 to destroy the World Trade Center and consequently unleash NATO's declaration under Article V, the invasion of Afghanistan, a military campaign against Iraq and the so called Global War on Terror - in short, the men who changed the world. Chief Judge Ernst-Rainer Schudt plans to announce the court's decision on Friday.

[Editor's Note: Motassadeq, the only person ever convicted for the September 11 attacks, was found guilty Friday of belonging to a terrorist organization, but not as an accessory to murder].

That will end an appeals process that has pushed the envelope of what even the most painstaking search for justice can achieve. During 65 days in session over the course of a year, the court questioned 112 witnesses (some of them multiple times) and agonized over the meaning of individual words in SMS transmissions [cell-phone text messages], over the content of religious duties and over verses of jihadi songs. The participants could hardly find a hair too fine to be split. The defense, in its closing argument, pointedly remarked, "Even our client's beard was of interest to this court."

The mammoth process laid bare a fundamental problem confronting the judiciary in countries under the rule of law that deal with the world of the "Osamaists." The more the court went into the depth of the environment, the customs and the attitudes of radical Muslims, the more it became clear that, in the end, non-criminal extremism can hardly be distinguished from criminal terrorism, especially when important evidence is unavailable due to a political decision.

Mounir al-Motassadeq; Mohammed Atta; Ramsi Binalshib; Marwan al-Shehhi; Siad Jarrah

The evidence presented in court proved beyond doubt, among other things, that Mounir al-Motassadeq is a strict Muslim believer. He hates America and "the Jews." In 1993 he moved from Marrakech [Morocco] to Germany to study electrical engineering.  Starting in 1996 he occasionally met his fellow students Mohammed Atta und Ramsi Binalshib, who was later named as chief planner of the 9/11 attacks, at Marienstrasse. 54, Hamburg. Motassadeq allegedly once prophesied, "the Jews will burn" and "we will dance on their graves." In 1996 he, along with Abdelghani Mzoudi, who has since been found not guilty of suspicion of terrorism, countersigned Atta's will. As of 1998 he had full power of attorney over Marwan al-Shehhi, with whom he shared close ties of friendship. This Arab is allegedly the terrorist pilot who flew the United Airlines Boeing aircraft into the World Trade Center's South Tower.

Hamburg, 1999; Atta [middle row, right], Motassadeq [top row, middle], Binalshib [top row, 3rd left]

While al-Shehhi was in Afghanistan in 1999, Motassadeq administered his bank account, cancelled his cell phone service and paid the semester's fees to Harburg Technical University. In the summer of 2000, while Atta, al-Shehhi und Siad Jarrah (the hijacker of the Boeing aircraft that crashed near Shanksville, Pennsylvania) were completing their pilot training in the U.S., Motassadeq traveled to a training camp in Afghanistan. Allegedly he only went there to learn those pious Muslim habits of riding, swimming and shooting. Back in Hamburg, he transferred 5,000 marks [German currency] from al-Shehhi's bank account to Ramsi Binalshib's bank account in September 2000. The prosecutors call that "a chain of indicators." Motassadeq was, they claim, the director of an organization that, starting in 1999, had developed the capacity to conduct attacks. The young men, they say, were bound together by "aggressive militancy that had jihad as its raison d'etre." How could, asked the prosecutors, Motassadeq have known nothing about the others' plans?

The defense calls all of this a "systematic set of allegations and innuendo." Motassadeq was Atta & Co.'s "little boy" who was not in the loop. Trips to Afghanistan and "verbal radicalism" are not unusual for young Muslims. If Motassadeq had actually known of the plans, then why did he not flee Germany after the attacks?

In February 2003 a different Chamber of the Superior Court agreed with the prosecution's arguments. What Motassadeq had done, the court judged, was not normal friendly cooperation among Arab students, but rather a criminal conspiracy. The sentence at the time was 15 years in the penitentiary. However, the following spring the Federal Court reversed the conviction and referred the case back to Hamburg for a new trial. The charges that Motassadeq was an accomplice to the deed, according to federal judges, "may be, in and of themselves, sustainable" - but the State Superior Court had not heard the possibly decisive evidence that could have exonerated him.

German Wanted Poster for Ramsi Binalshib

What the federal court was referring to was testimony of presumed al-Qaeda chief planner, Ramsi Binalshib. The Yemeni Binalshib has been in U.S. custody since September 2002. For reasons of "national security" the U.S. Government refuses to allow German judicial officials to question the man. What the Hamburg Court got in lieu thereof was a short fax with a summary of interrogation transcripts, which, in the words of the defense, was "evidence that is unique in the history of justice."

Where and, above all, how these summaries came about is unclear. The suspicion that Binalshib could have been tortured in Guantanamo or elsewhere seems reasonable. Appropriate inquiries by the Court of the German Ministries of Justice and of the Interior as well as of the Office of the Federal Chancellor yielded the response that the Federal Government could say nothing on the subject. Passing on information on U.S. interrogation conditions would "lead to a disruption of international diplomatic relations and the relationships among intelligence services."

Although the Binalshib-fax exonerated the accused, Motassadeq, the fundamental issue of whether or not testimony that may have been acquired under torture is admissible in German courts remains unanswered. After all, in the next, similar trail it could be a matter of testimony that incriminates the accused. Nevertheless, the Hamburg Superior Court decided that such evidence may be used. After all, the testimony was not proven to have been acquired under torture. In its decision, the Hamburg Superior Court put astonishingly little weight on principles of the rule of law. With Guantánamo in mind, the Court determined that excluding evidence can only be considered in cases of "especially serious cases of violations of human rights" and "simple imprisonment and segregation from outside contacts as well as the denial of a regular judicial process … for the period of less than three years, which can be assumed in this case … are not yet included as such a violation."

Perhaps the 11^th of September triggered such sentences. Motassadeq had let it be known, through his attorney, that he did not want to become "collateral damage in the judicial process." He most likely meant to say collateral damage of the impact of international politics on justice.