No More German Intelligence for 9/11 Trial

The German government said on Tuesday it would not provide any further intelligence to the retrial of Mounir al Motassadeq, the only man to be convicted of the Sept. 11 attacks, news agency AFP reported. In identical letters read to the Hamburg court, the office of Chancellor Gerhard Schröder and the interior ministry said that revealing any further classified information would go against "the higher interests of the security of the Federal Republic." In December 2003, during the trial of another man suspected of involvement in the Sept. 11 attacks, the German federal police produced in evidence a witness statement which was sympathetic to Motassedeq's case. The subject of the statement, whose identity was not revealed, said Moroccan national Motassedeq was not among the al-Qaeda members based in Hamburg who were the only people aware of the plan to fly hijacked planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. A fax sent to the Hamburg court shortly after the start of Motassedeq's retrial in August by the US Justice Department said two witnesses had indicated he had no knowledge of the planning for the attacks.