A Spanish court on Wednesday saw video footage, taken by an alleged al-Qaeda member, of the World Trade Centre and other alleged terrorist targets in the United States that were supposedly passed on to the organisers of the September 11 attacks.
The video showed often wobbly, blurry shots of the World Trade Centre, the Statue of Liberty, Empire State Building and other highlights of the New York skyline, taken during a 1997 trip by a Syrian-born al-Qaeda suspect, Ghasoub al-Abrash Ghalyoun.
The footage is one of the key pieces of evidence to support allegations that Ghalyoun and two other Spanish-based Islamists, for whom prosecutors have demanded prison terms totalling 62 500 years, helped to organise the September 11 attacks.
An indictment charges that the video is highly detailed, with shots of the World Trade Centre from several angles and amounts to ”preliminary information on the attacks against the twin towers”.
Ghalyoun testified that he shot the video as a tourist while on a 21-day tour of five American cities in August 1997, that included a visit to Hollywood and San Francisco.
”I didn’t just film emblematic centres, but all tourist centres. Unfortunately at one of those tourist centres there was the misfortune that happened [on September 11]. Who would have thought it,” he said.
He even filmed the Hollywood sign. ”This is the sign you see in all the Hollywood movies,” he said with a smile.
Ghalyoun denied passing the video to other al-Qaeda suspects, saying he showed it only to his wife. He said the video was just part of a coast-to-coast US trip he had wanted to make since he was a child. He was ”in love with the United States. I dreamt of travelling to the US.”
He recalled eating at a restaurant owned by the basketball legend Michael Jordan in Chicago, and, while filming from atop the 110-storey Sears Tower, feeling that ”I am on top of the clouds.”
Ghalyoun said he filmed a corridor and a runway at JFK airport because he was excited about what he was seeing. ”I had never seen so many planes parked on a runway — like a parking lot for planes,” he said.
He testified that he met other defendants in the trial, including Imad Eddin Barakat Yarkas, the alleged founder and leader of al-Qaeda’s Spanish cell, at a Madrid mosque.
Ghalyoun has spent most of the past three years in jail, and the first three days of the trial with 22 other suspects — mostly Syrians and north Africans — in the courtroom’s bulletproof glass cubicle.
While on the stand he retracted parts of a 2002 statement to investigators in which he said he believed that Barakat Yarkas had promoted jihad in discussions at the mosque. Ghalyoun said he was referring to another suspect, Mustafa Setmariam.
Setmariam is one of 17 suspects, including Osama bin Laden, who are at large or held by other countries.
Prosecutors said on Wednesday they would call as a witness Jamal Zougam, currently awaiting trial for alleged participation in last year’s train bombings in Madrid which killed 191 people.
United States President George Bush was rushed from the Oval Office to an underground shelter on Wednesday after indications that an unidentified aircraft had entered restricted space near the White House. Officials said later it had been a false alarm. – Guardian Unlimited Â