Agadir, Morocco ? Abdelghani Mzoudi fell into the arms of his sobbing mother as he emerged into the airport’s arrival terminal Tuesday, sent home to Morocco by German authorities after being acquitted of aiding the Sept. 11 hijackers.

He thanked God, the German legal system and his German lawyers. He said he never should have been charged with helping three of the suicide hijackers – Mohamed Atta, Marwan al-Shehhi and Ziad Jarrah – plot the 2001 attacks on the United States while all lived in Hamburg, Germany.

“They arrested me just because I knew the guys. I wasn’t the only one who knew them in the whole of Hamburg,” the soft-spoken Mzoudi told The Associated Press in his first comments to the media since his arrest in October 2002.

According to trial testimony, Mzoudi was close friends with the hijackers in Hamburg and had traveled to Afghanistan, where he stayed at an al-Qaida guest house. But the judges ruled prosecutors didn’t prove Mzoudi knew anything about the Sept. 11 plot.

His February 2004 acquittal was upheld this month, and Hamburg’s top security official, Udo Nagel, ordered him expelled.

Mzoudi, who was studying electrical engineering in Germany, said he was not interested in going back.

“Wasn’t it enough what they did to me for a year and a half?” he said. “They jailed me, stopped me from studying. I was unable to leave the city” after being acquitted.

Mzoudi, who often invoked God’s name and whose forehead is marked with the dark callus of someone who repeatedly touches his head to the floor in prayer, refused to talk about his stay in Afghanistan.