Friday, January 07, 2005
 Deutsche Presse-Agentur January 5, 2005:HAMBURG - The retrial of Mounir al-Motassadeq, the only person ever convicted of assisting the 11 September 2001 attack, will likely drag out to March as both sides sift and re-sift the sparse evidence, lawyers said on Wednesday.
The second trial, ordered by an appellate court, has been running five months before a Hamburg superior court, with the 30-year-old Moroccan electronics student free on bail and showing up each hearing day.
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To prove Motassadeq guilty of membership in Mohammed Atta's Hamburg terrorist cell and of being accessory to 3,000 murders, the prosecutors must at least demonstrate he knew what was going on...
With most of the evidence familiar from the first trial, the defence has also seized on expanded detail in testimony to suggest that it is fiction. The prosecution case largely rests on this circumstantial evidence.
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The prosecution has been exasperated that Washington is unwilling to declassify any data, if it exists, that incriminates Motassadeq.
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The next high point is likely to be 25 and 26 January, when a US special agent, Matthew G. Walsh, is to answer questions in court about how the United States obtained its knowledge of the plot.
Walsh will have lawyers representing the US government at his side, ready to object if any question oversteps Washington's rules on the release of intelligence secrets. ...  Der Spiegel December 31, 2004: Shadi Abdallah is the principal witness in German legal proceedings against suspected al-Qaida terrorists. But questions are arising about the credibility of Jordanian...
Despite the fact that Shadi Abdallah was an Islamic fundamentalist, he let the booze flow freely. He likes to boast that he could down 20 beers without getting drunk. He also had a 40-cigarette-a-day smoking habit, and a fondness for hashish. These aren't the kinds of things devout Muslims like to see and, according to their standards, he could also have been a little more conservative when it came to sexual activity....
The Jordanian-born Abdallah ... quit his job as terrorist leader Osama Bin Laden's bodyguard after only two weeks. As a terrorist, he pocketed €25,000 he had been given to buy false passports.
His latest role is that of the key witness. In fact, he is the only star witness in all major legal proceedings that have brought against presumed al-Qaida terrorists in Germany. He has testified against Mounir al-Motassadeq ...
But in keeping with his rather unimpressive track record, Abdallah isn't a particularly effective star witness, constantly supplying his critics with reasons to question his credibility. His checkered past, the details of a psychiatric evaluation, his repeated recanting of previous testimony, as well as other inconsistencies make him an easy target for his opponents in court.
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German investigators arrested Abdallah in the northern German city of Krefeld in April 2002, accusing him of being a member of Islamic terrorist group Al-Tawhid. He began talking immediately. Some of his stories sounded so bizarre that an official of the German Federal Office of Criminal Investigation (BKA) initially said that "it's difficult to believe any of this."
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Could it be that Abdallah, like so many other key witnesses in the past, simply made up much of his testimony? According to Jürgen Schüttler, the attorney for one of the four Düsseldorf defendants, "it's interesting to see how often the man is caught in a lie." Six years ago, Abdallah already appeared as the key witness in another case. The case fell apart because his testimony couldn't be corroborated. At the time, the district attorney prosecuting the case said that he had "reason to believe that this man has deliberately given false testimony."
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American federal prosecutors are hoping the Jordanian's testimony in a US court will help further their case against Zacarias Moussaoui...
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