The only man convicted of helping the September 11th suicide hijackers won the right to a retrial this morning after a successful appeal at Germany's Supreme Court.
Mounir El Motassadeq, a Moroccan, was sentenced to 15 years in jail in February 2003 for conspiring to murder the nearly 3,000 people who died in the 2001 attacks in the United States and for membership of a terrorist group, a German al-Qaeda cell US authorities say led the attacks.
Motassadeq's lawyers had argued new evidence that secured the acquittal last month of his friend and fellow-Moroccan Mr Abdelghani Mzoudi had made Motassadeq's conviction unreliable.
Mr Mzoudi's acquittal hinged on information, passed to the court by German investigators, that neither he nor Mr Motassadeq belonged to a core group of plotters in the city of Hamburg who had advance knowledge of the plans to hijack four airliners and crash them into prominent US landmarks.
The information was presumed to have come from US questioning of Ramzi bin al-Shaibah, a key al-Qaeda suspect and member of the Hamburg cell who is in US custody, but the judge said there was no way for the court to assess its reliability.
Mr Motassadeq's lawyers have said a retrial in Hamburg could prompt Washington to release more information about the attack plot, possibly including bin al-Shaibah's testimony.
Germany's federal prosecutor criticised the United States last month for failing to make available fuller intelligence and information from captured suspects that could help to secure convictions. He called the conduct of the United States "incomprehensible".