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Reuters
Mounir al-Motassadek was arrested on Monday about 12 hours.
Germany will deport Monday an accomplice of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 against the United States, the Moroccan Mounir al-Motassadek.
Motassadek spent nearly 15 years in jail for taking part in the deaths of passengers on the ransacked planes used in the attacks.
He has served most of his sentence and is sent to Morocco.
He always denied participating in the September 11 plot, but confessed to being friends with those who did.
The German authorities transport him under heavy surveillance.
The photographs taken on Monday showed that Motassadek wore a blindfold and had his hands tied, taken from prison by helicopter.
Motassadek was the first person sentenced for the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, which left nearly 3,000 dead.
The German Der Spiegel website reports that Morocco had insisted that Motassadek steal on a regular commercial flight – where he will be seated with several row officers 32.
Once arrived in Morocco, his fate is not clear.
Who is Motassadek?
Mounir al-Motassadek was arrested just months after the September 11 attacks.
He was friends with Mohammed Atta, the alleged pilot of one of the hijacked planes, and knew other members of the al-Qaeda cell in Hamburg.
He also admitted to having stayed at an Al Qaeda camp in Afghanistan in 2000 and signed the Atta will.
But precisely, his involvement in the September 11 attacks has been the subject of five years of trial, multiple convictions, appeals and annulled verdicts.
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EPA
Motassadek photographed in a German court in 2005
He arrived in Germany as a 19 year old student in 1993, when he studied electrical engineering at the University of Hamburg.
German prosecutors believe that he met Mohammed Atta on the spot and that he maintained this relationship while Atta was founding a radical Islamic association with links to Al Qaeda.
After the attacks on the United States, investigators discovered that Motassadek had a power of attorney in a bank account owned by Marwan al-Shehhi: the alleged pilot of a second plane bound for the World Trade Center.
He also organized a bank transfer for some members of the cell and knew when they went to the United States where they acquired their flight training.
This led prosecutors to call him group treasurer and accomplice of the attacks.
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EPA
Special armed forces closely monitor the transfer of prisoners to Hamburg
But Motassadek said his actions were only favors for friends – and that he had never heard of the plot until he saw the faces of his friends appear to the news on television.
He was tried in 2002 and sentenced to 15 years in prison in 2003 for aiding the 9/11 conspirators. But this verdict was overturned by the German Supreme Court in 2004.
A new trial was completed in 2006 and sentenced him to a different charge: belonging to a terrorist organization, which did not make him aware of the plot.
He appealed – and in 2007, at the last trial, he was found guilty of complicity in murder.
He was sentenced to 15 years imprisonment: the maximum that the German court can impose for this crime.
