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Spain begins terror trial for 24 suspects

MADRID - 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, expected to last until July, were Europe's biggest trial of alleged al-Qaida militants and made Spain the second country after Germany to try suspects in the Sept. 11 attacks.

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.

"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, 42, a father of six who allegedly directed a terrorist cell that provided logistical cover for Sept. 11 plotters. Yarkas is expected to testify next week.

LONDON - A British judge sentenced a Muslim scholar to 13 years in prison Friday after he admitted conspiring with shoebomber Richard Reid to blow up a trans-Atlantic jetliner in 2001.

Judge Adrian Fulford said he believed that Saajid Badat backed out of an alleged plot with Reid, who was subdued by passengers when he attempted to detonate a bomb in his shoe aboard an American Airlines flight from Paris to Miami on Dec. 22, 2001, with 197 people on board.

Prosecutors said Badat, 25, of Gloucester, England, conspired to detonate a bomb in a shoe on a different flight from Amsterdam, Netherlands, to the United States in a plan coordinated with Reid. But he had second thoughts.

WASHINGTON - A German citizen detained for five months in an Afghan prison was released in May 2004 on direct orders from Condoleezza Rice, then the national security adviser, after she learned the man had been mistakenly identified as a terror suspect, the New York Times reported Friday, citing government officials who requested anonymity.

The officials, who confirmed an account of Rice's decision that was first reported by NBC News, said that when Khaled el-Masri was taken from a bus on the Serbian-Macedonian border on Dec. 31, 2003, it was believed he was a member of al-Qaida.

But within several months it was concluded he was the victim of mistaken identity, the officials said. His name was similar to a Qaida suspect, they said.

By then, Masri, 41, a car salesman who lives in Ulm, Germany, had been flown on a CIA-chartered plane to the prison under a secret American program of transferring terror suspects from country to country for interrogation, officials said. At the prison in Kabul, Masri said, he was shackled, beaten, photographed nude and injected with drugs by interrogators who pressed him to reveal ties to al-Qaida.

The case reached Rice in May 2004, officials said, and she ordered him immediately freed.

Masri said Friday that he expected an apology.

"I hope that America will in the future respect the rights of people," he said.

[Last modified April 23, 2005, 00:55:10]