Germany

Officials arrest suspected al-Qaida cell member

German police on Thursday arrested a Moroccan student who signed the last will of Sept. 11 commander Mohamed Atta, and charged him with helping to prepare the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington.

After nearly a year of investigation, officers took Abdelghani Mzoudi into custody at dawn in a friend’s apartment in Hamburg, the northern port city in which authorities believe Mzoudi was part of an eight-member al-Qaida cell. Mzoudi, 29, an electrical engineering student at the Hamburg College of Applied Sciences, is accused of attending an al-Qaida terrorist training camp during the summer of 2000 in Afghanistan, where the attacks were first planned.

Kay Nehm, the country’s top federal prosecutor, contends that Mzoudi lent money for pilot training to Zakariya Essabar, 25, another Moroccan student, who left Germany before the Sept. 11 attacks. Essabar was to have been one of the hijackers, German investigators say, until he was denied a U.S. visa.

Nehm said Mzoudi helped hide suicide pilot Marwan al Shehhi in the weeks before he traveled to the United States in May 2000 to begin taking flying lessons.

London

Gene may signal deadly form of prostate cancer

In a discovery that could someday help guide treatment of men suffering from early stages of prostate cancer, researchers studying DNA in tumors say they have found a gene that predicts whether the cancer will develop into its most lethal form.

Some prostate tumors stay confined to the organ while others do not, but doctors have no way to tell the difference before the spread occurs. The aggressive, metastatic form kills more than 30,000 U.S. men each year.

In their study, University of Michigan Medical School researchers examined tumor cells taken from prostate cancer patients. They found 55 genes that were more active in metastatic cells than in less-lethal cells. A gene called EZH2 was the most active of all.

In addition, patients with clinically isolated prostate cancer, who showed higher levels of the EZH2 protein, were likelier to eventually get the deadlier form of the disease.

The findings were published Thursday in the journal Nature.

Florida

Astronauts wire new girder to international space station

Two spacewalking astronauts floated outside Thursday and wired a new $390 million girder to the international space station.

David Wolf and Piers Sellers shouted, “Yippee!” and “Excellent!” when it was time to get to work on the 45-foot-long, 14-ton girder that arrived with them Wednesday aboard space shuttle Atlantis.

Wolf connected power and data cables, as Sellers released the locks on the three folded-up radiators mounted to the girder.

The construction began Thursday morning, when Peggy Whitson and Sandra Magnus used the station’s robot arm to lift the girder from Atlantis’ cargo bay and put it in place next to a similar frame that was installed last spring. A mechanical claw and motorized bolts locked the pieces together.