Trial set to begin for second September 11 suspect

GERMANY launches the second trial of a suspected September 11 plotter on Thursday in a case expected to provide further insight into the Hamburg al-Qaida cell that led the hijacked airliner attacks on US cities.

Moroccan Abdelghani Mzoudi, 30, who shared an apartment with some of the suicide hijackers in Hamburg, is charged with 3,066 counts of aiding and abetting murder and membership of a terrorist organisation.

If found guilty, Mzoudi faces the same 15-year jail term to which fellow Moroccan Mounir El Motassadeq was sentenced in February for his part in the plot.

Prosecutors say Mzoudi, like Motassadeq, handled money for a hijacker and got paramilitary training in Afghanistan.

Unlike Motassadeq, who unwittingly incriminated himself with testimony that included an account of a trip to an al-Qaida camp in Afghanistan, Mzoudi will not testify, a move lawyers say may make the prosecution case harder to prove.

"We are expecting a much more rigorous and aggressive defence than in the Motassadeq case," one lawyer said.

Germany launched an investigation into militants among its three-million-strong Islamic population after the September 11, 2001, attacks exposed it as a haven for the plotters.

Mzoudi's defence lawyers say they will submit an opening statement after the indictment is read and prosecutors should bring their first evidence on Friday.

Both cases have posed a dilemma for the justice system does helping pay the hijackers' rent or settling their day-to-day bills constitute complicity in the attacks or was it merely the typical Muslim practice of helping others abroad?

Prosecutors say Mzoudi was involved in preparations for the attack until the last moment and shared the Islamist group's violent goals.

According to the indictment, Mzoudi sorted out financial matters for fugitive Zakariya Essabar, another Moroccan who may have planned to be one of the suicide hijackers but was denied a visa to enter the United States before the attack.

Prosecutors say Mzoudi helped cover up the absence of other members of the group who had gone to al-Qaida camps in Afghanistan, where he also trained from April to July 2000.

They say he also covered up for plot leader Mohamed Atta and Marwan Al-Shehi, who US authorities say piloted the two planes that crashed into the World Trade Center in New York, by allowing them to claim they were living at his address in Hamburg. Defence lawyers are likely to argue, as in the trial of Motassadeq, that Mzoudi did little more than help fellow Muslims and his aid was not central to plot.