MADRID — A Moroccan fugitive sought in connection with the March 11 train bombings in Madrid was indicted yesterday on charges of helping to plan the September 11 attacks in the United States — the first suspect linked to both attacks.
Amer Azizi, 36, helped organize a meeting in northeast Spain in July 2001 that key plotters in the U.S. attacks, including suicide pilot Mohamed Atta, used to finalize details, Judge Baltasar Garzon said in the indictment.
Azizi was also included in an indictment Judge Garzon handed down in September against al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and 34 other terror suspects. Azizi was charged then with belonging to a terrorist organization. Bin Laden and nine others were charged with planning the September 11 attacks.
In the new indictment, Azizi is charged with multiple counts of murder — “as many deaths and injuries as were committed” on September 11, 2001 — for helping to plan the attacks.
Azizi provided lodging for people who attended the July 2001 meeting in the Tarragona region of Spain and acted as a courier, passing on messages between plotters, Judge Garzon said in the indictment.
According to a U.S. congressional investigation, Atta flew to Madrid in July 2001, where authorities believe he met with conspirator Ramzi Binalshibh to discuss the plot. Binalshibh, who provided money to many of the hijackers, is in U.S. custody at an undisclosed overseas location. The U.S. investigation made no mention of any other conspirators in Spain.
Yesterday’s indictment described Azizi as the right-hand man of Imad Yarkas, jailed in November 2001 on charges of leading a Spain-based al Qaeda cell that provided financing and logistics for people who planned the September 11 attacks.
Judge Garzon said the new indictment is based on information provided by authorities in Britain, Turkey and the United States.
Azizi had a “direct connection with al Qaeda leaders in Afghanistan who were responsible for the attacks,” Judge Garzon charged.
In a separate order yesterday, Judge Garzon said he had identified a person previously known as Shakur, who was indicted last year along with bin Laden on charges of plotting the September 11 attacks. Judge Garzon said new police information showed Shakur was Fakid Hilali, a 35-year-old Moroccan detained in Britain since September for immigration problems. The judge called for his extradition.
The Interior Ministry released a photo of Azizi this month, calling him a suspect in the March 11 bombings in Madrid, in which 191 persons were killed and more than 2,000 were wounded. But he has not been formally charged, and the judge leading that investigation, Juan del Olmo, has not issued an arrest warrant.
Azizi has been on the run since he fled Spain in November 2001, shortly after a wave of arrests that netted Yarkas and more than a dozen other al Qaeda suspects.
Zacarias Moussaoui, a French citizen, remains the only person charged in the United States as a conspirator in the September 11 attacks. Moussaoui, who is awaiting trial in Virginia, has admitted belonging to al Qaeda but denies he was part of the terror plot.
The only September 11 suspect ever convicted walked out of a German jail last month, less than 2 years into his 15-year sentence after judges ruled the evidence was too weak to hold him pending a retrial.
Mounir el Motassadeq, a 30-year-old Moroccan, had been convicted on more than 3,000 counts of accessory to murder and membership in a terrorist organization.
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