The trial of a Moroccan student, accused by German prosecutors of aiding some of the men who carried out the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, opened on Thursday in Hamburg, which is home to an al-Qaeda cell whose members are believed to have played the central role in the plot.
The student, Abdelghani Mzoudi, 30, was charged with 3,066 counts of murder, one for each of the Sept. 11 victims at the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington, both struck by hijacked airliners, as well as in a Pennsylvania field where a fourth hijacked plane crashed.
Mzoudi has not admitted any role in the terror plot, and his lawyers are expected to argue that he did nothing more than give unwitting help to fellow Muslims, remaining ignorant of their plans to attack the US.
"My mother raised me and tried to give me the values of honesty, not stealing and not killing and respecting the good values of Islam," he said on Thursday in response to questioning from the presiding judge.
But in the 92-page indictment, Mzoudi is accused of giving knowing help to the Hamburg cell, whose members included three of the presumed hijacker-pilots in the attack, including its presumed ringleader, Mohammed Atta.
The indictment says Mzoudi handled money for at least one of the hijackers and covered up for the absences of others while they received training in Afghanistan and after they arrived in the US to prepare for the attacks.
"From early summer 1999 until September 11, 2001, he was a member of a terrorist organization and helped the suspected terrorists commit murder and other crimes," the prosecutor, Matthias Krauss, told the court.
The Mzoudi trial is the second to take place anywhere in the world in connection with the Sept. 11 attacks. The first, also in Hamburg, was of another Moroccan, Mounir El Motassadeq, who was convicted in February of giving material aid to the hijackers and sentenced to 15 years in prison, the maximum term allowed. Motassadeq has appealed.
Both trials highlight the importance of Hamburg as a place where a group of Islamic militants from several Arab countries, most of them ostensibly students, came together and formed what prosecutors have described as an active al-Qaeda cell.
The members, in addition to Atta, included Marwan al-Shehhi and Ziad Jarrahi, both believed by investigators to have piloted the hijacked jets. Al-Shehhi is believed to have steered a plane into the south tower of the World Trade Center and Jarrahi is said to have taken over the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania.
In addition to the hijackers themselves, German and American investigators have identified a group of other cell members who came to Hamburg during the 1990s and were recruited into the Qaeda network. These include key figures, especially Ramzi Binalshibh, now in US custody, who was believed to have been one of the two principal organizers of the attacks, Motassadeq and Mzoudi.
Many of the Hamburg cell members, including Mzoudi, are said by prosecutors to have gone to Afghanistan, where they received training by al-Qaeda and were given instructions
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