JURIST - Paper Chase: 9/11 suspect convicted on retrial in Germany

[JURIST] The Hamburg Supreme Court convicted Mounir el Motassadeq [BBC profile] Friday of belonging to a terrorist organization and sentenced him to seven years in prison, but acquitted him of being an accessory to the murder of the over 3,000 people killed in the World Trade Center attacks. The German Supreme Court [official website in German] threw out [JURIST report] his conviction on both counts last year, citing insufficient evidence as justification for retrial. In announcing Friday's opinion, presiding Judge Ernst-Rainer Schudt criticized the US authorities for the limited evidence [JURIST report] provided at the retrial, where the Department of Justice supplied summaries of interrogations of three detained 9/11 suspects, but refused to provide full copies of the reports or allow those witnesses to testify. The interrogations showed Motassadeq provided funding for one of the 9/11 plotters, but that he did not know how the money would be used [JURIST report]. "This material on its own had no value as evidence," according to Schudt, referring to concerns that the US obtained the statements by torturing the detainees [JURIST report], rendering them unusable by a German court. In a statement [text] Thursday, Amnesty International [advocacy website] said the Hamburg court violated international law by accepting the evidence without investigating complaints of torture. AP has more.

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