Agadir, Morocco – Abdelghani Mzoudi fell into the arms of his sobbing mother as he emerged into the airport’s arrival terminal Tuesday, sent home to Morocco by German authorities after being acquitted of aiding the Sept. 11, 2001, hijackers.
He thanked God, the German legal system and his German lawyers.
He said he never should have been charged with helping three of the suicide hijackers – Mohamed Atta, Marwan al-Shehhi and Ziad Jarrah – plot the attacks on the United States while all lived in Hamburg, Germany.
“They arrested me just because I knew the guys. I wasn’t the only one who knew them in the whole of Hamburg,” the soft- spoken Mzoudi told The Associated Press in his first comments to the news media since his arrest in October 2002. “All Arabs knew each other.”
According to trial testimony, Mzoudi was close friends with the hijackers in Hamburg and had traveled to Afghanistan, where he stayed at an al-Qaeda guest house. But the judges ruled prosecutors didn’t prove Mzoudi knew anything about the Sept. 11 plot.
His February 2004 acquittal was upheld this month, and Hamburg’s top security official, Udo Nagel, ordered him expelled. Nagel said the 32-year-old Moroccan would not be permitted to return.
“Mzoudi was part of the Islamist scene, endangered the security of Germany and supported a terrorist network,” Nagel said.
Mzoudi, who was studying electrical engineering in Germany, said he was not interested in going back.
“Wasn’t it enough what they did to me for a year and a half?” he said.
Michael Rosenthal, Mzoudi’s lawyer, said his client’s trip to Afghanistan didn’t mean he was guilty of anything.
“We never established that he did any training there,” Rosenthal said.
Mzoudi said he knew Atta, the suspected leader of the hijackers, as a fellow college student in Hamburg.
“I guess we were friends,” he said, “but I didn’t know what was inside him or anything about his personal affairs.”
