Witness: Moroccan anti-Semitic

HAMBURG, Germany – A Moroccan accused of helping the Sept. 11 suicide hijackers approved of Hitler’s extermination of the Jews and was part of a group that raged against the United States “because it defends Israel,” witnesses testified Wednesday.

Sudanese student Ahmed Maglad, 30, testified he met defendant Mounir el Motassadeq while living in Hamburg in 1997 and through him met lead suicide pilot Mohamed Atta, who he said was “aggressively religious” and was always trying to “prove something.”

Maglad told the state court he also knew Ramzi Binalshibh, a U.S. detainee who is the suspected contact between al Qaeda and the Hamburg cell that included three of the Sept. 11 suicide pilots.

“Everybody spoke out against the United States because it defends Israel,” Maglad said. The Hamburg group, he said, believed that “the foundation of Israel was unjustified, and the Palestinian conflict was always a topic for Atta.”

Appearing at el Motassadeq’s retrial, Maglad said Atta became “too much” for him and was one reason he changed schools and moved to Berlin in 1998. He portrayed el Motassadeq as firmly allied with Atta.

“Mounir and Atta didn’t have any quarrels and Mounir once suggested when I was of a different opinion that I should be quiet,” Maglad testified.

El Motassadeq’s retrial began last week after his conviction for helping pilots Atta, Marwan al-Shehhi and Ziad Jarrah was overturned in March on appeal. A court ruled he had been unfairly denied evidence from U.S.-held al Qaeda suspects including Binalshibh.

Ralf Goetsche, 34, a Munich engineer who shared an apartment in Hamburg student housing with el Motassadeq and three others in 1996, testified that Atta came to visit the defendant several times a week.

Goetsche said el Motassadeq became increasingly radical the longer he knew him.

Once, he testified, el Motassadeq said “that what the Germans did then wasn’t really so bad. So I asked what he meant and he said ‘with the Jews.’ “

On another occasion, el Motassadeq took exception to someone mentioning Israel and burst out, “There is no Israel, there is only Palestine,” Goetsche said.

When the retrial opened last week, the court heard U.S. interrogation summaries in which Binalshibh maintained that only he and the three Hamburg-based suicide pilots – but not el Motassadeq – knew of the Sept. 11 plot.

Prosecutors hope testimony like that by Maglad, Goetsche and others will offset those statements by showing how closely others were involved with the plotters and their discussions of jihad, or holy war.

Maglad testified Binalshibh once visited him in Berlin and said Binalshibh “found his wife” there. Presiding Judge Ernst-Rainer Schudt read from files that the unidentified woman broke up with Binalshibh in 2000 after finding him too radical.

Schudt said the woman told police she awoke one morning to see “Binalshibh holding and kissing a curved dagger during prayer.”

El Motassadeq, 30, was freed from prison in April. He is being retried on the same charges – membership in a terrorist organization and more than 3,000 counts of accessory to murder – for which he was originally sentenced to the maximum 15 years in 2003.

El Motassadeq says he knew and was friends with most of the principals of the Hamburg cell, but was not privy to their deadly plans.