BERLIN - The U.S. Justice Department has denied a German court's request for testimony from two suspected members of al-Qaida who are in U.S. custody but will allow court representatives to question Ahmed Ressam, who is accused of trying to bomb the Los Angeles airport in December 1999.
The Justice Department will not allow questioning of Ramzi Binalshibh, who was detained in Pakistan in September, or Zacarias Moussaoui, who is being held in the United States on suspicion he was intended to be the 20th hijacker in the attacks of Sept. 11.
The decision came in a letter made public yesterday by the lawyer for Mounir el-Motassadeq, who is on trial in Hamburg accused of being involved in planning the Sept. 11 attacks.
One of el-Motassadeq's lawyers, Hans Leistritz, said Binalshibh's testimony could show that el-Motassadeq was unaware of the Sept. 11 plot.
Binalshibh is suspected of having been a member of the Hamburg cell led by Mohammed Atta that was at the heart of the Sept. 11 plot. After he was arrested by Pakistan, he was handed over to U.S. authorities, who have not said where he is being held.
Leistritz said he found the Justice Department's decision "very strange."
"Did they ask Moussaoui and Binalshibh if they would like to testify?" he asked.
In court yesterday, Aysel Senguen, 28, a former girlfriend of Ziad al-Jarrah, one of the Sept. 11 hijackers, said that she had met Jarrah in 1996 in the northern town of Greifswald, where they both were studying. After Jarrah moved to Hamburg in 1997, she said, he became more religious, and asked her to cover herself, which she declined to do.
She said Jarrah left the country in February 1999, telling her that he was going to visit his parents in Lebanon. German investigators said Jarrah traveled at that time to Afghanistan. Senguen, whose description of possible links between Jarrah and el-Motassadeq was tenuous, said she had suspected he might have gone to Chechnya.
She said she last saw Jarrah in July 2001 in Germany. Then he called her on the morning of Sept. 11.
According to a German reporter present yesterday, she told the court: "He said three times that he loved me. I asked what was wrong, but he said nothing, just that he loved me, and then hung up."