October 1, 1995
Web posted at: 8:40 p.m. EDT
From Correspondent Brian Jenkins
NEW YORK (CNN) -- The ten defendants sat quietly as Judge Michael Mukasey read the verdicts Sunday morning: guilty, nearly all the way down the line of 25 counts, starting with seditious conspiracy, a seldom-used charge.
Prosecutors claimed that blind Egyptian cleric Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman led the conspiracy "to wage a war of urban terrorism" and force a change in American policy toward the Middle East.
The jury of six men and six women found the Sheik guilty of willful involvement in that broad conspiracy, a plot to murder Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, and a plot to bomb several targets in Manhattan: the United Nations Complex, the FBI office tower, and two major traffic tunnels.
Jurors also convicted Egyptian immigrant El-Sayyid Nosair of the 1990 murder of Jewish extremist Meir Kahane. A state court jury had found Nosair guilty only of weapons possession in that killing.
As for the bombing conspiracy, the federal jury saw an FBI tape of six men mixing fuel and fertilizer to make explosives.
The defense claimed only two of those men knew the intended targets: Emad Salem, a former Egyptian army officer turned FBI informant who will make more than a million dollars for his efforts, and Siddig Ibrahim Siddig Ali, a Sudanese immigrant who pleaded guilty just after the trial began.
The other men claimed they thought they were merely training to fight with fellow Muslims in Bosnia.
The jury didn't buy it.
Defense attorneys claim that fear -- and religious beliefs -- played a part in the jury's verdict.
Valerie Amsterdam, attorney for defendant Fadil Khallafalla, said the prosecution's strategy was "simply to tell the jury every single day, over and over and over again, 'Don't take chances. The ends justify the means. Get them, lock them up. Its too risky to acquit anyone here.'"
Lynne Stewart, lead defense lawyer for Abdel-Rahman, said the verdict's message was "put a Muslim on trial and they will convict them."
"It's a dangerous climate because if they come first for the Muslims, who will they come for next," Stewart said.
But U.S. attorney Mary Jo White, who led the prosecution, disagreed with both suggestions.
"I think the jury's attentiveness...belies that," she said. "There was substantial evidence. This was not a case about fear or religious beliefs." (203K AIFF sound or 203K WAV sound)
Two defense attorneys vow to pursue complaints that FBI agents let the informant tape conversations without approval, destroy some tapes and pass others to the Egyptian government.
"I don't want terrorism in this city," said Amsterdam. "I live in this city. But I don't think the way to stop terrorism is to send a message out there that we will break our own laws and ignore our own rules of justice."
But prosecutors said their case was sound. "The trial was represented in a thorough and competent manner," said Robert Khuzami, who gave the prosecution's opening arguments eight months ago.
And Paul Fitzgerald, who gave the closing arguments, said federal attorneys were not concerned about the defense's claims. "We weren't very worried at all," he said. "Most of the evidence was on tape, and the jury listened." (168K AIFF sound or 168K WAV sound)
The Sheik and several of his co-defendants now face life behind bars. The rest could get 20 years or more.
The U.S. Attorney here won't say if any of the other people named as unindicted co-conspirators in the case will be brought to trial, only that the investigation of terrorist groups in the U.S. continues.
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