Germany gets bin Laden guard off U N terror list

Germany gets bin Laden guard off U N terror list

BERLIN, Jan 4 (Reuters) A former bodyguard of Osama bin Laden, recently freed from prison in Germany, has been removed from a United Nations terror sanctions list in a rare move that follows months of German lobbying in Washington.

The delisting of Shadi Abdalla is a victory for Berlin, which values him as a key informant against other militant suspects still on trial and has given him a new identity and placed him under police protection.

A U N Web site said he was only the fifth person, and the first for more than two years, to be removed from a list of militants whose assets all U N member states must freeze.

But a German official said Abdalla's case had unique features.

''To my knowledge this is the first and only case where a convicted terrorist who has served his prison sentence has been delisted,'' he told Reuters today He said he hoped other militants might be encouraged to follow Abdalla's example and turn informer. ''There is life after terrorism. You can come back if your hands are not too bloody.'' The Web site of the U N's ''1267 Committee'', which oversees sanctions against people and groups associated with bin Laden, his al Qaeda network and the Afghan Taliban militia, says Abdalla, a Jordanian, was deleted from its list on December 23.

Abdalla's lawyer, Ruediger Deckers, told Reuters his client could now receive financial support from the authorities and open a bank account, measures that were illegal while the sanctions against him remained in place.

27.12.2004


Press: UN to Take Terrorist Off Terror List


The United Nations is to strike a convicted Jordanian extremist from its list of terror suspects following a request from German authorities, newsweekly Der Spiegel reported in its Monday issue. The magazine said Shadi Abdellah, who was jailed by a German court in November 2003 for four years on charges of membership in a terrorist organization, would be the first suspect to be taken from the UN list. Abdallah, who claimed to work briefly as a bodyguard for al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, was released from prison in November after serving more than half his sentence. Der Spiegel said that because Abdellah has cooperated with German authorities, Berlin had put in the request to "rehabilitate" him. He had figured on the UN terror suspects list since 2003. The report said the effort met with initial resistance from US authorities, who said that Abdellah was lying to feign cooperation with German police. But German Interior Minister Otto Schily intervened and allowed US investigators to question Abdellah, who is now to testify in the US trial of Frenchman Zacarias Moussaoui, the only person facing criminal charges directly linked to the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, according to the report. A spokesman from the German interior ministry refused to comment.