Mzoudi update - 9/11 trials

Thanks to Jay for sending the link to follow up my post on Mzoudi.

The mysterious witness, who goes by the name Hamid Reza Zakeri and claims to have been a longtime member of the Iranian intelligence service, is said to have told German investigators that the Sept. 11 plot represented what one termed a "joint venture" between the terrorist group Al Qaeda and the Iranian government.

Sources familiar with Zakeri's story, greeted with skepticism by some German intelligence officials, say he also implicates the defendant, a 31-year-old Moroccan and former student named Abdelghani Mzoudi, as a knowledgeable participant in the hijacking plot.

"If the story was true, the consequences would be remarkable," said one senior intelligence official, who observed that Zakeri's account comes nearly 2 1/2 years after Sept. 11, 2001, and "looks a little bit constructed."

Zakeri is not expected to appear in the high-security Hamburg courtroom Thursday, where officials of the German federal police, the BKA, have been summoned to explain why they believe Zakeri's testimony is credible.

...The appeal to the court to consider Zakeri's story amounts to a last-minute move by the chief German prosecutor, Kay Nehm, to preserve the fast-fading possibility of a conviction in what is likely to be the last trial in Germany of an alleged accomplice of the Sept. 11 hijackers.

...Kenneth R. Timmerman, a senior writer for Washington-based Insight magazine, said he interviewed Zakeri during several telephone conversations last summer and that the man "told a very credible story."

...According to an article by Timmerman that was published in July, Zakeri says that he worked for the Iranians' "supreme leader," Ayatollah Ali Khameini, and that he was present at two meetings between senior Iranian and Al Qaeda officials in the months before Sept. 11.

Timmerman said Zakeri had provided him a document purportedly signed by the Iranian intelligence chief, Hojjatoleslam Ali Akbar Nateq-Nouri, in May 2001, ordering a strike at the United States' "economic structure, their reputation and their internal peace and security."  article

Stay tuned, I guess.

....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.

Is there a bottom to this?