Spain opens major trial of al-Qaida suspects

updated 4:28 p.m. ET April 22, 2005

MADRID, Spain - Twenty-four suspected al-Qaida members went on trial Friday, including the group’s alleged ringleader in Spain and two associates accused of aiding one of the Sept. 11 suicide pilots who flew a jetliner into the World Trade Center.

The proceedings were Europe’s biggest trial of alleged al-Qaida militants and made Spain only the second country after Germany to try suspects in the attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people on Sept. 11, 2001. The only man charged in the United States, Zacarias Moussaoui, pleaded guilty Friday to helping al-Qaida carry out the attacks.

In a sometimes feisty appearance, the lone native-born Spaniard among the 24 Muslim defendants said he neither supported nor rejected al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden but insisted that he himself rejected all forms of terrorism.

Defendant: ‘Muslims are not terrorists’
“Muslims are not terrorists,” said Luis Jose Galan, 39. “All we want is to live in peace.”

The lead defendant is Syrian-born Imad Yarkas, a 42-year-old father of six who allegedly directed a terrorist cell that provided logistical cover for Sept. 11 plotters, including Mohamed Atta, who is believed to have piloted one of the two planes that destroyed the twin towers in New York. Yarkas is expected to testify next week.

Lawyers for at least one defendant say they might seek testimony from terrorism suspects in U.S. custody. The only person convicted of involvement in the Sept. 11 plot — Mounir el Motassadeq in Germany in 2003 — had the verdict overturned when an appeals court ruled his trial was unfair because the U.S. did not produce such testimony. He is being retried.

“It is very possible we will seek testimony from persons held in the United States,” said Manuel Tuero, lead attorney for the suspected financial brains behind the Madrid cell, Mohamed Ghaleb Kalaje Zouaydi. “We’ll have to see how the trial goes,” he said.

Yarkas’s lawyer, Jacobo Teijelo, said he would not make such a motion.

Among other things, Yarkas is charged with helping arrange a July 2001 meeting in Spain between Atta and Sept. 11 coordinator Ramzi bin al-Shibh, who is now in U.S. custody. Teijelo said it would pointless to seek testimony from al-Shibh to show the meeting did not take place. “A negative fact cannot be proven,” he said in an interview.

The trial opened just over a month after the first anniversary of Spain’s own brush with alleged al-Qaida terrorism — bombings on commuter trains in Madrid that killed 191 people.

The Socialist government elected after the March 11, 2004 attack says it was probably prompted not by the presence of Spanish troops in Iraq — as asserted by militants who claimed responsibility in videotapes — but rather was revenge for the arrests of Muslim militants ordered by magistrate Baltasar Garzon in November 2001. Many of those arrested went on trial Friday.

An eight-year investigation by Garzon concluded that Muslim extremists leading quiet lives as businessmen, laborers and waiters operated in Spain for years, recruiting men for terrorist training in Afghanistan, preaching holy war and laundering money for al-Qaida.

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