World's first Sept 11 convict released in Germany
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20060207/ts_afp/usattacksgermany
2 hours, 42 minutes ago
HAMBURG, Germany (AFP) - The first person to be convicted over the September 11, 2001 attacks in the United States, Moroccan national Mounir El Motassadeq, was released from a German prison pending a ruling on an appeal, authorities said.
The justice department in the northern city of Hamburg said that the decision to release Motassadeq had been made on the basis of a federal court ruling upholding a complaint by the 31-year-old Moroccan.
Motassadeq left the prison in the company of his lawyer on Tuesday evening, according to journalists at the scene.
He had been found guilty in August in a retrial of belonging to a terrorist organization for plotting holy war with fellow Muslim extremists, including three of the September 11 suicide hijackers in New York and Washington.
He was jailed for seven years but both the prosecution and the defense have appealed the sentence.
His lawyer Gerhard Strate told AFP he filed the suit demanding Motassadeq's release with the federal constitutional court in the southwestern city of Karlsruhe on the grounds that he had been held in custody during the year-long retrial.
He said that since he had not abused the trust the court placed in him at that time, it would be "capricious" to hold him in custody pending the decision on the appeal.
It was not immediately clear when the decision on whether to grant a retrial would be made.
Motassadeq was first found guilty in February 2003 and jailed for the maximum 15 years on more than 3,000 counts of accessory to murder and membership in a terrorist organization in the world's first conviction in connection with September 11.
But a retrial was ordered when a federal court in 2004 quashed the verdict on the grounds that US authorities had refused to allow the court to question top suspects from Osama bin Laden's Al-Qaeda network in American custody.
During the new trial, the court found there was no evidence to show that Motassadeq had been directly involved in the attacks in New York and Washington, although he was found to be a member of the so-called Hamburg cell at the heart of the plot.
A Spanish court last September jailed Imad Eddin Barakat Yarkas, alias Abu Dahdah, the Syrian head of an Al-Qaeda cell based in that country, for 27 years for conspiring to commit murder in the attacks in New York and Washington.
Dahdah was jailed for 13 years for complicity in the attacks and 12 for belonging to a terrorist organisation.
"His participation was not proven regarding the execution of the attacks," the judges ruled, but the verdict indicated that he was linked to "Al-Qaeda's macabre designs."
Spain's High Court also jailed 17 other people, including a reporter for the Al-Jazeera television station, for between six and 11 years.
