Al-Qaida suspect denies charges

AL-QAIDA’S suspected leader in Spain denied arranging a last-minute meeting between one of the suicide pilots and a key planner of the September 11 attacks, calling the 2001 strikes “terrible savagery” in testimony yesterday.

“I don’t know these people,” said Imad Yarkas, who is charged with helping to organise the 2001 attacks, referring to suicide pilot Mohamed Atta and coordinator Ramzi bin al-Shibh.

“Not once in my life have I been with them,” he said.

Yarkas, a 42-year-old Spaniard of Syrian origin, is on trial in Spain on charges he helped plot the attacks as leader of a Muslim cell.

Authorities say Yarkas arranged a meeting for Atta and bin al-Shibh on July 16, 2001, in the Tarragona region of north-east Spain.

Prosecutor Pedro Rubira did not cite any evidence to back up that claim, but asked Yarkas if it was true, and the defendant said no.

Yarkas said the attacks were “terrible savagery”.

“I didn’t have anything to do with it.”

He was also asked about a telephone conversation on August 27, 2001, in which an associate allegedly called him and said people he knew “had entered the area of aviation and had even slashed the throat of the bird,” according to a translation in the September 2003 indictment against Yarkas.

Judge Baltasar Garzon has said the conversation suggested that the Moroccan, now identified as Farid Hilali, was involved in the September 11 plot, and it amounted to evidence that he was involved with flying planes shortly before the attacks. Hilali is jailed in Britain fighting extradition to Spain.

He said the conversation had nothing to do with the attacks. “This has nothing to do with what you say it does,” he said.