Al Qaida suspect denies helping to plot September 11 attacks.

AL QAIDA'S suspected leader in Spain denied arranging a last-minute meeting between one of the suicide pilots and a key planner of the September 11 attacks, calling the 2001 strikes 'terrible savagery' in testimony yesterday.

'I don't know these people,' said Imad Yarkas, the accused leader of a cell charged with helping to organise the 2001 attacks, referring to alleged suicide pilot Mohamed Atta and September 11 co-ordinator Ramzi bin al-Shibh.

'Not once in my life have I been with them,' Yarkas told prosecutor Pedro Rubira.

Yarkas, a 42-year-old Spaniard of Syrian origin, is standing trial in Spain on charges that he helped plot the September 11 attacks as leader of a radical Muslim cell.

Authorities say Yarkas arranged a meeting for Atta and bin al-Shibh on July 16, 2001, in the Tarragona region of north-east Spain.

In questioning, Rubira did not cite any evidence to back up Spain's claim that Yarkas had done this. He simply asked Yarkas if it was true, and the defendant said no.

Yarkas was also asked about a now-infamous telephone conversation on August 27, 2001, in which a Moroccan associate allegedly called him from London and said people he knew 'had entered the area of aviation and had even slashed the throat of the bird'.

Yarkas said he did not remember the conversation clearly but that it had nothing to do with the September 11 attacks