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. "All Arabs knew each other."

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. Nagel said the 32-year-old Moroccan would not be permitted to return.

"Mzoudi was part of the Islamist scene, endangered the security of Germany and supported a terrorist network," Nagel said. "Such people are not welcome in Germany."

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.

Michael Rosenthal, Mzoudi's German lawyer who flew with him to this Atlantic coast town, said his client's trip to Afghanistan didn't mean he was guilty of anything.

"We assume he was in Afghanistan, but we never established that he did any training there .... What was established was that tens of thousands of Muslims have gone to these camps in Afghanistan for entirely different purposes," Rosenthal said.

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.

He said he knew Atta, the suspected leader of the Sept. 11 hijackers, as a fellow college student in Hamburg.

"What brought us together was the fact that we studied in the same university," Mzoudi said.

His relationship with the Egyptian-born Atta was normal, he said. "I guess we were friends, but I didn't know what was inside him or anything about his personal affairs."

Before his deportation, another of Mzoudi's lawyers had said her client feared being detained and interrogated when he returned to Morocco, but he said Tuesday that he was not worried.

At the airport, a Moroccan security officer said the government had no intention of arresting Mzoudi. But it appeared he would be closely watched.

Another security official chatted amicably with Mzoudi as he waited for his documents to be processed and shook his hands as he left the terminal. A third official escorted Mzoudi and his family to their van before they headed to their hometown of Marrakesh.

Mzoudi's mother, Aicha Ajadi, wearing the traditional Moroccan veil that covers all of the face but the eyes, is eager that her son start fresh. She has arranged for him to marry her sister's daughter.

Mzoudi said he was happy to be back in Morocco, but he shied from discussing marriage plans.

"Before anything, I have to decide about my future. I have not yet decided what I'm going to do," he said.

For now, he added, "I'm happy to be sitting next to my mother."

His mother was so overwhelmed when she first spotted him waiting to clear arrival formalities that she nearly fell to the floor and had to be helped to a chair by her other son.

When the frail Mzoudi approached, she hugged him and showered him with kisses.

"Are you well?" she begged to know.

"Shukr billah" - thanks be to God - he replied.