MADRID, Sept 26: The Syrian head of an Al Qaeda cell based in Spain was jailed on Monday for his role in the September 11, 2001 attacks in the United States, at the end of the biggest trial to date in Europe involving Osama bin Laden’s network.

Spain’s High Court also jailed 17 other people, including a reporter for the Al Jazeera television station, for between six and 11 years.

In a verdict that stretched to 445 pages, Imad Eddin Barakat Yarkas, alias Abu Dahdah, was sentenced to 27 years jail for conspiring to commit murder in the September 11 attacks which killed nearly 3,000 people.

He was regarded as the head of a Spanish-based Al Qaeda cell that had been under investigation since 1995.

Dahdah was jailed for 13 years for complicity in the US attacks and 12 for belonging to a terrorist organization.

“His participation was not proven regarding the execution of the attacks,” the judges ruled, but the verdict indicated that he was linked to ‘Al Qaeda’s macabre designs’.

The prosecution had accused Dahdah and a Moroccan, Driss Chebli, of arranging a July 2001 meeting in Tarragona, northeastern Spain, attended by Mohamed Atta, ringleader of the September 11 hijackers.

Prosecutor Pedro Rubira said the meeting ‘probably determined the date of the attacks on the United States’.

Chebli was given six years in jail after being found guilty of collaborating with Al Qaeda.

But Syrian Abrash Ghalyoun, who along with Dahdah and Chebli had stood accused of aiding and abetting the carnage of September 11, was freed along with five others found not guilty on lesser charges alleging Al Qaeda collaboration.

The sentences of those found guilty of helping the group were a far cry from those which prosecutors had demanded after an outcome which suggested that a trial slated for next year of 28 mainly Moroccan suspects believed behind last year’s Madrid train bombings will be at least as complex.

Prosecutors had wanted Dahdah, Chebli and Ghalyoun to be handed ‘exemplary’ sentences of a record 74,377 years — 25 years for each of the 2,973 September 11 victims and 12 more for membership of a ‘terrorist’ organization.

Jailed for seven years was TV reporter Tayssir Alluni, who, while working for pan-Arab television station Al Jazeera in Afghanistan in 2001 secured an interview with bin Laden.

Al Jazeeranever broadcast the interview which was, however, shown in edited form on CNN.

Alluni, Syrian-born but a naturalized Spaniard, had faced a maximum nine years.

“My husband has been sent down for telling the truth... for doing his job. And he would do the same again,” his wife Fatima Zahra told reporters after the sentencing.

Al Jazeera said it would appeal against the ‘unfair’ conviction following a ‘verdict (which) is very disappointing’, director-general Waddah Khanfar told AFP in Doha.

“We still believe our colleague Tayssir is innocent of the charges against him,” he added.

An appeal must be announced within ten days.

Alluni, who had insisted on his innocence throughout the trial, was accused of acting as a financial courier to the group while in Afghanistan, Alluni said he was only doing his job as a journalist.

The court said Alluni was not a member of the Dahdah-led Spanish cell, but ‘collaborated... in determined fashion’ with Al Qaeda and used his position to pass information to and from members of the organization.

The other 15 suspects to be jailed were given terms ranging from six to 11 years on charges relating to collaboration with the network, and a further six were acquitted.—AFP