From Bloomberg today:

A court in Hamburg, Germany, sentenced Mounir El-Motassadeq, the first suspect tried for involvement in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the U.S., to seven years in prison following a retrial.
The Hamburg Higher Regional Court today found the Moroccan national guilty of membership of the Hamburg terror cell that took part in the atrocity, the court’s press office said. El-Motassadeq had pleaded not guilty.
The court had sentenced the 31-year-old former student in the first trial in February 2003 to the maximum 15 years in prison for being an accessory to the murder of more than 3,000 people and for membership of a terrorist cell. The verdict was overturned by the Federal Court of Justice a year later.
The appeals court said then that evidence from the U.S. that might have exonerated El-Motassadeq hadn’t been heard and referred the case back to the regional court in the northern port city. El- Motassadeq, who usually appeared in court in jeans and an open- necked shirt, has been living in a Hamburg apartment since his release from prison in April 2004.
The U.S. denied the Hamburg court’s request to hear testimony from Ramzi Binalshibh, an alleged mastermind of the attacks, who is held by the U.S. at an undisclosed location after his capture in Pakistan in 2002. The U.S. only sent a summary of minutes from his interrogations that indicate El-Motassadeq may not have known about the attacks.

The article goes on to say that El-Motassadeq attended an al-Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan, and maintained a bank account in the name of one of the 9/11 hijackers. But, because evidence provided by a jihadist in U.S. custody “might have exonerated” El-Motassadeq, the Germans released this man from their custody back in April 2004. And now they’ve decided to put him back on the street again in 7 years. By then, of course, we can all rest assured that the German prison system will have completely rehabilitated him, and he will happily rejoin society as a peace-loving citizen of the world.