9/11 Hijacker Made Last 'i Love You' Call

A Hamburg court was given an insight yesterday into the last hours of one of the alleged pilots in the September 11 attacks during the trial of Mounir el-Motassadeq, a Moroccan accused of being the paymaster for the al-Qaida cell which led the strikes.

Aysel Sengun, the German girlfriend of Ziad Jarrah, 26, who is believed to have flown the aircraft that crashed in a field in Pennsylvania after passengers apparently stormed the cockpit, said he had called to tell her he loved her.

"He called me on September 11 - he was very brief," she told the court. "He said he loved me three times. I asked what was up. He hung up shortly afterwards - It was so short and rather strange him saying that repeatedly."

Ms Sengun, who is of Turkish descent, said she helped Jarrah find a flying school and sat as a "passenger" while he piloted a flight simulator in Florida.

The couple met in 1996 in the western German city of Bochum, where she was studying to become a doctor.

Ms Sengun talked of problems in their relationship, and said Jarrah became increasingly devout after moving to Hamburg at the end of 1997.

"He had a different view of Islam than I did. He was more serious - He wanted me to cover up. I said I wouldn't do so for him, only for God," she said.

Jarrah disappeared from Germany between November 1999 and February 2000, telling her he was going to visit his parents in Lebanon.

Ms Sengun said he had talked about Chechnya and she suspected he might have gone there to fight. Prosecutors say he went to an al-Qaida camp in Afghanistan.

Ms Sengun said he returned with gifts of clothing and jewellery, and told her he was going to drop out of his engineering course and train as a pilot. "We wanted to get married at some point and have children. He said he wanted to become a commercial pilot."

After Jarrah moved to Florida, she went to visit him in January 2001. She told the court she sat like a passenger as Jarrah trained in a Boeing flight simulator. "He told me not to tell anyone that he was in America. I did tell a few people and he was very annoyed."

Ms Sengun has been under police protection since mid-September.