Free Republic

The retrial of the only man to have been convicted of involvement in the Sept. 11 terror attacks has been scheduled to begin on Aug. 10, defense lawyers told AP news agency on Friday. In 2003, a Hamburg court had sentenced Moroccan Mounir el Motassadeq to 15 years in prison for his alleged role in helping to plan the attacks. But Germany's Federal Court of Justice threw out the conviction earlier this month, saying that the evidence against Motassadeq had not been sufficient for a conviction. Motassadeq has been released on bail pending his retrial. A verdict could come by...

KARLSRUHE, Germany - The only person in the world convicted in the Sept. 11 attacks won a retrial Thursday after an appeals court faulted Washington for refusing to allow testimony from a key al-Qaida captive. The Federal Criminal Court overturned the conviction of Mounir el Motassadeq, a Moroccan, leaving German prosecutors with little to show for their efforts to pursue suspects who may have belonged to the Hamburg cell that included three of the suicide hijackers. A month ago, el Motassadeq's friend Abdelghani Mzoudi was acquitted of identical charges of giving logistical aid to the cell. Relatives of Sept. 11...