9/11 planned in Afghanistan

2003-10-24 20:22

Hamburg - The September 11 attacks on the United States were planned in Afghanistan and not the northern German city of Hamburg, a senior federal police official told a court on Friday.

Appearing at the trial of Abdelghani Mzoudi, who is charged with conspiracy in the attacks, the head of Germany's constitutional police, Heinz Fromm, said the suicide hijackers were recruited in Afghanistan at the end of 1999.

Fromm said that Mohammed Atta, an Egyptian believed to have led the hijackers and who had lived in Hamburg, had chosen his co-conspirators at an al-Qaeda training camp there that December.

None of them "undertook activities which had anything to do with flight training" or the planning of attacks on the United States before that time, he told the court.

Mzoudi is charged with accessory to murder in more than 3 000 cases, based on the September 11 death toll, and membership of a "terrorist" organisation. He has admitted having contacts with the hijackers but has denied the charges.

Prosecutors have claimed he was already involved in the conspiracy at the latest in spring 1999, months before Fromm claimed the team had been assembled.

Mzoudi's lawyers called for the charges to be dropped because the evidence no longer fitted the prosecution's "time frame", but prosecutor Walter Hemberger dismissed the defence's claims.

Fromm said he thinks Atta, who flew a hijacked passenger jet into the World Trade Center in New York, two other suicide pilots, Marwan al-Shehhi and Ziad Jarrah, and suspected logistics chief Ramzi Binalshibh planned the attacks in Afghanistan.

All four had lived in Hamburg. Binalshibh was arrested a year after the attacks and is currently being held in US custody.

Fromm said only that the four could have been making plans to travel to the breakaway Russian republic of Chechnya before December 1999 to take part in the fighting there, plans which were eventually dropped.

- AFP