Germany deports associate of 9/11 hijackers to Morocco

France floods kill 13

BERLIN, Oct 15, (Agencies): Germany has deported a Moroccan associate of the September 11 hijackers after he served most of a 15-year jail term for helping organise the 2001 attacks on US targets, authorities said on Monday.

was a member of a group of radical Islamists based in the northern German city of Hamburg who helped bring about the suicide attacks with hijacked airliners that killed nearly 3,000 people.

Handed the maximum sentence of 15 years in 2007 for being an accessory to mass murder, Motassadeq is one of only two men convicted to date of involvement in the plot.

“It’s good to know that Mr. Motassadeq is now out of the country so we can close this chapter for Hamburg,” State Interior Minister Andy Grote said in a statement e-mailed to Reuters.

Photographs showed a man with covered eyes being led by two armed policemen to a helicopter. German media had reported that Motassadeq was taken to Frankfurt to be deported to Morocco, where his family lives. El Motassadeq At his 2007 trial, his lawyers argued that Motassadeq knew nothing about the September 11 plot. But prosecutors said he played a central role in suicide hijacker Mohammed Atta’s group by running the financial affairs of some cell members.

3 hurt in Cologne hostage-taking:

German police said Monday they ended a hostage-taking in a pharmacy in Cologne’s main train station, gravely wounding the alleged perpetrator after he himself injured two people.

“Special response units overpowered the man. During the police action he hurt two bystanders, one of them seriously,” police said in a statement.

The attacker had to be resuscitated and was in intensive care for “extremely serious” injuries sustained when officers stormed the shop, they added.

“The motive of the attacker remains unclear,” a spokesman said soon after he was subdued.

A woman held hostage by the perpetrator was only “lightly wounded”, police tweeted shortly after she was freed around 3:00 pm (1300 GMT).

But another victim, a 14-year-old girl, was brought to hospital suffering from burns.

Eyewitnesses said the teenager had been in a cafe close to the pharmacy immediately before the hostage-taking.

Police set up a webpage where members of the public could upload pictures and video related to the incident, while their own investigations were “at full pitch”. They began receiving calls about the violence around lunchtime.

Bavaria poll rocks Merkel’s coalition:

Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Bavarian sister party said on Monday it would back political stability in Berlin after suffering big losses in a regional election which their far-right foes hailed as “an earthquake” that would rock the coalition government.

The conservative Christian Social Union (CSU) slumped to its worst election result in almost 70 years in Sunday’s election in Bavaria and Merkel’s other coalition partner, the centre-left Social Democrats (SPD) saw their support halve.

CSU leader Horst Seehofer, who is also interior minister in Merkel’s loveless coalition, had hoped his anti-immigration rhetoric and criticism of Merkel’s liberal asylum policies would help his party fend off a threat from the far-right in Bavaria.

Kremlin downplays Trump remarks:

The Kremlin on Monday downplayed televised comments by US President Donald Trump that Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin was “probably” involved in assassinations and poisonings, saying they did not amount to a direct accusation.

“The US president didn’t make any direct accusations,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told journalists after a CBS News interviewer asked Trump: “Do you agree that Vladimir Putin is involved in assassinations? In poisonings?” and he answered: “Probably he is, yeah.”

Peskov said that in any case there are no grounds for accusations against the Russian president.

Russia has insisted two suspects in the nerve agent poisoning of former Russian double-agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter are ordinary citizens.

Flash floods kill 13 in France:

Flash floods tore through towns in southwest France, turning waterways into raging torrents that killed at least 13 people, nine of them in just one town, authorities said Monday. People had to be helicoptered to safety from the roofs of their homes as overnight storms dumped the equivalent of several months of rain in just a few hours.

Worst hit was the town of Trebes, east of the medieval walled city of Carcassonne. The rains that swept in from the Mediterranean killed nine people there, Interior Ministry spokesman Frederic de Lanouvelle said. He told BFMTV that the floods in the Aude region also killed four other people in other locations, left one person missing and seriously injured five others.

New EU chemical arms sanctions:

The EU set up a new sanctions mechanism targeting those who use and develop chemical weapons on Monday, as part of a crackdown in the wake of the Skripal attack. The framework gives the European Union the power to impose restrictive measures on anyone identified as being involved in the development or deployment of chemical weapons, regardless of their location or nationality.

Fears have been growing among world powers that the century-old taboo on the use of chemical weapons is being eroded, following the nerve agent attack on a former Russian spy in Britain and repeated uses of gas and banned substances in the Syrian conflict.