PARIS, 18 May 2005 — A French court jailed three men for two to seven years yesterday for helping Al-Qaeda agents who killed Afghan resistance leader Ahmad Shah Masood just before the Sept. 11 attacks.

The main Paris criminal court also jailed two other men for helping recruit fighters for Afghanistan, handing them sentences of two and five years respectively.

The court jailed Algerian national Abderrahmane Ameuroud and Frenchmen Adel Tebourski and Youssef El Aouni for seven, six and two years respectively for providing logistical assistance to Masood’s assassins.

The trio were convicted of providing funds and forged documents to the two Tunisian militants who posed as journalists and died when they detonated a bomb that killed Masood during an interview in Afghanistan two days before the 9/11 attacks.

Al-Qaeda targeted Masood because he was a key military and political leader of the Northern Alliance, the main opposition to the fundamentalist Taliban movement that had provided Osama Bin Laden’s movement with a base in Afghanistan.

Known as the “Lion of Panjsher”, Masood was credited with playing a key role in defeating Afghanistan’s Soviet occupation. Despite his death, the Northern Alliance evicted the Taleban from power with Western military support.

Tebourski admitted during the trial he had helped finance the trip from Germany to Afghanistan of one of Masood’s killers. But he said he had no idea Dahmane Abd El Sattar was planning to assassinate the Afghan warlord.

Police arrested the accused after forces across Europe established the killers had been provided with fake Belgian passports.

French intelligence said the bomb which killed Masood had been planted in a camera stolen from a journalist’s car in the French Alpine city of Grenoble on Dec. 24, 2000.

The two men jailed for lesser offences were Franco-Algerian national Merhez Azouz and Khellaf Hamman. They received jail terms of five and two years respectively for helping recruit fighters for Afghanistan from 1998-2000.

The so-called “Campers’ Group” organized military training in the Fontainebleau Forest close to Paris, Normandy and the French Alps, and dispatched Islamic volunteers to Afghan camps. The court cleared two others — Ibrahim Keita and Azedine Sayeh — of wrongdoing, against the recommendation of the public prosecutor, who had sought six and two year jail terms.