Posted on 06/05/2003 2:39:56 PM PDT by dennisw
Moroccan Arrested in France Over Sept 11 Attacks 1 hour, 47 minutes ago Add World - Reuters to My Yahoo!
PARIS (Reuters) - A Moroccan man wanted in connection with the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States has been arrested in France, a judicial source said on Thursday.
Karim Mehdi, 34, was arrested Sunday. Thursday he was put under official investigation -- one step short of pressing charges in France -- for "participation in an association of criminals linked to terrorist activities."
The source said Mehdi was suspected of being connected to an al Qaeda cell in Hamburg, Germany, which is accused of planning the attacks. The cell also included Mohamed Atta, who U.S. authorities say piloted one of the two planes that crashed into the World Trade Center.
Mehdi, the first person to be arrested in France in an investigation into the attacks, was seized at Paris's Charles de Gaulle airport after arriving on a flight from Germany, the source said. He was waiting to fly on to the French-ruled Indian Ocean island of La Reunion.
The source said his arrest was ordered by French anti-terrorist magistrate Jean-Louis Bruguiere as part of the probe into the attacks. The arrest was initiated following a complaint filed by the family of a French September 11 victim.
In February, a Hamburg court convicted another Moroccan man, Mounir El Motassadeq, of aiding the suicide hijackers and being an accessory to the murder of 3,066 people. He was the first September 11 suspect to be convicted anywhere in the world and was sentenced to the maximum 15 years in prison.
German federal prosecutors last month charged another Moroccan man, Abdelghani Mzoudi, with being an accessory to the murder of the September 11 victims and of belonging to Osama bin Laden (news - web sites)'s al Qaeda network, blamed for the attacks.
In the United States, Zacarias Moussaoui, a French citizen of Moroccan descent, is being tried for conspiring in the attacks. He says he was not involved.
The attack hijackers seized four planes and rammed two into New York's World Trade Center towers and one into the Pentagon (news - web sites) in Washington. A fourth crashed in Pennsylvania.
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