Lawyers appeal conviction of 9/11 hijackers' friend

BERLIN, Jan 9 (Reuters) An appeal will be filed today for a Moroccan who was a friend of the September 11 hijackers and was sentenced to 15 years in prison this week, a defence lawyer said.

''I continue to see the chances for an acquittal as very good,'' Udo Jacob, an attorney for 32-year-old Mounir El Motassadeq, told Reuters.

Motassadeq, who was a member of a group of radical Arab students in Hamburg which helped organise the 2001 attacks, was sentenced to 15 years by a Hamburg court yesterday for accessory to mass murder.

He is one of only two men convicted of involvement in the plot which resulted in the deaths of nearly 3,000 people.

Jacob said he was preparing other legal steps, but revealed no details.

Motassadeq's sentence of 15 years was the maximum allowed under German law and was in line with the demands of the Federal Prosecutor's Office.

In November, Germany's top appeals court in Karlsruhe found Motassadeq guilty of abetting the murder of 246 passengers and crew who died on four planes that crashed on September 11, 2001.

The decision overturned a 2005 ruling which convicted Motassadeq of belonging to a terrorist organisation and handed him a seven year jail sentence. It cleared him of abetting mass murder.

That court said he was a low-tier member of the group led by suicide hijacker Mohammed Atta and Motassadeq's lawyers insist he knew nothing about the plot to fly planes into targets in New York and Washington.

But prosecutors successfully argued in November that under a ''division of labour'' within Atta's group, Motassadeq played a key role in running the financial affairs of other cell members and covering up their absence from Germany before the attacks.

Another of Motassadeq's lawyers, Ladislav Anisic, said on Monday he had already filed an appeal against the November ruling several weeks ago with Germany's Constitutional Court.

The complex and drawn-out case has strained Berlin's relations with Washington as German courts tested how far the United States would go in giving sensitive evidence.

Zacarias Moussaoui, a French citizen of Moroccan descent who received a life sentence from a US court in May 2006, is the only other person convicted of links to the attacks.

REUTERS BDP BST2115