(22 Apr 2005) SHOTLIST
1. Wide of van pulling in with prisoners inside
2. Various of officer with rifles
3. Civil guards bringing suspects in the van
4. Gates to the court in foreground with guards unloading prisoners from the van in the background
5. Wide of van
6. Civil guard helicopter through the trees
7. Wide of van and prisoners being escorted from the van by police (guards dressed in blue are police)
8. Van backs out
9. Police with sniffer dogs patrolling media vans
10. Cutaway media
11. Setup shot of Fatima
12. SOUNDBITE: (Spanish) Fatima (no surname given), wife of Tayseer Allouni, a suspect who is a correspondent for the Arabic-language Al Jazeera television:
"I don't have an opinion about what al-Qaida has or doesn't have. I can only give an opinion about what I know about my husband and that's all.
Q: What did your husband tell you about it?
A: All I know is that my husband is innocent. That's all I know and that's what we will prove in this trial.
Q: What's he being accused of?
A: He's accused of funding Al Qaida with 4-thousand dollars.
Q: And what does he say to that?
A: That he's innocent."
13. Cutaway officers standing guard
14. Various of courthouse exterior and sign
STORYLINE
Twenty-four suspected members of an al-Qaida cell were brought into a Madrid court on Friday to face charges that they used Spain as a staging ground to plot the September 11 attacks.
The men, mostly Syrians and Moroccans, were unloaded from vans and escorted into a makeshift courtroom where they sat on wooden benches in a small, bulletproof chamber.
Spain is only the second country in the world after Germany outside of the United States to try suspects allegedly involved in the attacks on New York and Washington.
The trial culminates a lengthy inquiry by Baltasar Garzon, Spain's top anti-terrorism magistrate.
He began investigating Muslim militants in Spain in the mid-1990s and started arresting September 11 suspects just two months after the attacks.
The lead defendant is Imad Yarkas, 42, a Syrian-born Spaniard with a wife and six children, who allegedly oversaw an al-Qaida cell that provided logistical cover for the plotters such as Mohamed Atta, believed to have piloted one of the jets that struck the World Trade Centre.
Perhaps the best known defendant is Tayseer Allouni, a correspondent for the Arabic-language Al Jazeera television who network who had an exclusive interview with Osama bin Laden less than two months after the September 11 attacks.
He is accused of funding al-Qaida with US four thousand dollars but his wife, Fatima, proclaimed his innocence on Friday.
"My husband is innocent. That's all I know and that's what we will prove in this trial," she told reporters.
Two other suspects are accused of specifically of helping plan the attack.
They are Moroccan Driss Chebli, 33, who allegedly helped Yarkas arrange a meeting in Spain in July 2001 attended by Atta and September 11 coordinator Ramzi bin al-Shibh; and Syrian-born Ghasoub al-Abrash Ghalyoun, 39, who took detailed video footage of the World Trade Centre and other landmarks in 1997.
Garzon indicted 41 suspects in all, including al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden and fugitive Moroccan Amer Azizi.
Only 24 of those suspects were located in Spain, which was also struck by suspected al-Qaida-linked terrorists in the Madrid train bombings of March 2004, which killed 191 people.
The remaining 17 are either fugitives or in custody in other countries.
This week's trial is expected to lay out legal guidelines for that case as well.
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