Self-Styled 9/11 Planner On Trial in Tunisia Blast

PARIS, Jan. 5 -- Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the self-styled mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, went on trial in Paris on Monday on charges he helped organize a truck-bomb attack on an ancient Tunisian synagogue seven months later in which 21 people were killed.

Although far less deadly than the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks, the Tunisia bombing dramatized al-Qaeda's support beyond Afghanistan and Pakistan. It occurred as the United States and the rest of the world were coming to grips with the threat posed by Osama bin Laden and beginning to understand that his followers were scattered in a number of countries, including some in Europe and North Africa.

Mohammed, 44, who was captured in Pakistan in March 2003 and is being held at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, is being tried in absentia. Two co-defendants, Christian Ganczarski, 42, a German citizen of Polish origin who converted to Islam, and Walid Naouar, 28, a Tunisian, appeared in a Paris courtroom under tight security as proceedings got underway for what is scheduled to be a five-week trial before an anti-terrorism tribunal.

According to charges brought by French authorities, Naouar's brother, Nizar, drove a tanker truck laden with propane gas into the historic Ghriba synagogue on the Tunisian island of Djerba on April 11, 2002. The blast killed the driver and 14 German tourists, five Tunisians and two French citizens, providing the basis for a trial in France.

Prosecutors alleged Monday that Nizar Naouar followed directions from Ganczarski and Mohammed in carrying out the attack. He received more than $20,000 from Mohammed to pay for the preparations, they said, and called Mohammed in Pakistan and Ganczarski in Germany just before the bombing, using a satellite phone.

According to French authorities, Ganczarski told Naouar during their final conversation, "May God reward you."

Walid Naouar, whose family lives in France, knew of the attack beforehand and helped by providing his brother with the satellite telephone, a modem and false identity papers, the prosecutors charged.

The defendants were charged with complicity in murder and complicity in attempted murder in a terrorist undertaking. If convicted, they face life in prison. Mohammed, in a separate proceeding at Guantanamo, has already pleaded guilty to organizing the Sept. 11 attacks in the United States.

A lawyer for the German victims, Judith-Adam Caumeil, told reporters that her clients were hoping for a life sentence for Naouar and Ganczarski based on what she described as ample evidence.

German police provided French prosecutors with the gist of the key conversation between Nizar Naouar and Ganczarski, presumably from a telephone tap. German authorities had been monitoring Ganczarski since the Sept. 11 attacks because of his previous trips to Afghanistan, where officials said he met and was videotaped with bin Laden, and his relationship with an al-Qaeda group in Hamburg that hosted several of the Sept. 11 hijackers before they went to the United States.

According to French authorities, Ganczarski was born a Catholic in Poland but lived in Germany, where he converted to Islam in the 1980s along with his German wife. He visited Saudi Arabia in the 1990s, they said, learning Arabic and deepening his Islamic convictions. He met Nizar Naouar during a trip to Pakistan in 1999, they said.