Holy War Planning Described

A German college student who was part of the radical Islamic scene for two years in the late 1990s said a group of young men that included three Sept. 11 hijackers was constantly searching for a way to join a Muslim holy war.

Shahid Nickels, a 21-year-old German convert to Islam, said in court Tuesday that the young Arabs were almost obsessed with jihad, cheerfully singing songs about martyrdom and talking of little else.

“They always talked about Kosovo, Afghanistan, Chechnya. They felt it was their duty to do something there,” Nickels said at the trial of Mounir Motassadeq, charged as an accessory to more than 3,000 murders -- those who died in the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and the Pentagon.

The group revolved around suspected suicide pilot Mohamed Atta, who was older and better-educated than the others, and Ramzi Binalshibh, who traveled throughout Germany, Nickels said, meeting fellow fundamentalists in Cologne, Dusseldorf and Berlin.

Binalshibh was captured in September in Pakistan and is in U.S. custody. He described himself in a television interview before his capture as the coordinator of the Sept. 11 attacks.

Even before his capture in a bloody shootout in Karachi, some American and European analysts were saying that Binalshibh was a figure of rising importance within the Al Qaeda terrorist network.

Much of the testimony in the 3-week-old trial of Motassadeq, a Moroccan accused of providing logistical support to the hijack teams, has focused on Binalshibh and has bolstered the view that he was among the leaders of the Hamburg cell.

Binalshibh introduced Nickels to the group in 1997. Nickels described him as “very religious, very charismatic, very charming, very intelligent. You had to like him. He knew many, many people, and many people knew him. He had knowledge of the human nature.... He was the person in the group who was respected the most.”

Nickels said Motassadeq introduced Atta and Binalshibh to a group of Moroccan Muslims, who were thought to be among the most radical fundamentalists in Hamburg.

Tuesday marked the first appearance at the trial of a lawyer representing Stephen Push, whose wife died aboard the airliner that crashed into the Pentagon.

By German law, every person who loses a relative through a homicide is allowed to take part in the trials of those accused in the deaths. Push’s German lawyer will be allowed to question witnesses and call his own.