Police charge second Moroccan over 9/11

GERMAN federal prosecutors yesterday said they had charged a second Moroccan man suspected of providing support for the Islamic militant group behind the September 11, 2001 attacks on the US.

Federal prosecutors said they had charged Abdelghani Mzoudi, a 30-year-old Moroccan, with being an accessory to the murder of 3,066 people and of membership in the al-Qaida cell based in Hamburg that helped plan the attacks.

Mzoudi was detained in October, 2002 in Hamburg on suspicion he was among a group of 10 people in the city who supported the September 11 attackers. Prosecutors in Germany are investigating about 100 people on suspicion of aiding extremist groups.

Hijackers, believed to be part of Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaida group, seized planes on September 11, 2001, and rammed two into New York’s World Trade Centre towers and one into the Pentagon in Washington while a fourth crashed in Pennsylvania.

In February, a Hamburg court convicted another Moroccan man, Mounir El Motassadeq, of aiding the suicide hijackers and being an accessory to the murder of 3,066 people.