New Jersey Brothers Get Life for Fort Dix Terror Plot

Three brothers were sentenced to life in prison for conspiring to kill soldiers at the Fort Dix Army base in New Jersey or other military targets in a plot that authorities said was homegrown terrorism.

Dritan “Tony” Duka, 30, was sentenced with his brothers Shain, 28, and Elvjir, 25, for their convictions on conspiracy and weapons charges by an anonymous jury in December. The Dukas were illegal immigrants from Macedonia who settled in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, in the 1980s and ran a family roofing business.

“Nothing has a greater impact on society than a crime of terrorism,” U.S. District Judge Robert Kugler said today in sentencing Dritan Duka in federal court in Camden, New Jersey. “He clearly intended to and planned on killing American soldiers solely because of their status as American soldiers.”

The sentences follow a 15-month FBI investigation and eight-week trial. Prosecutors said the men grew up in the U.S., adopted extremist religious views, and were inspired by online jihadist videos to plan an attack on America. Each of the brothers protested the verdicts, accusing prosecutors and the judge of ignoring evidence or inflating the charges.

“I am innocent, I am innocent, I am innocent,” Shain Duka told the judge today in a packed courtroom with extra security.

Dritan and Shain Duka got an additional 30 years each for buying machine guns from an FBI informant. Two co-defendants will be sentenced tomorrow. Each of the five were acquitted of attempted murder. All three Dukas were ordered to repay $125,000 to the U.S. for the cost of additional security at Fort Dix.

via Read Full Article – Bloomberg.com.

Five Found Guilty In Fort Dix Terror Trial

A jury has found five men guilty of conspiring to kill soldiers at Fort Dix, New Jersey, a spokesman for the U.S. Attorney’s office said Monday.

The defendants were acquitted of attempted murder charges but face life in prison.

The jury spent six days deliberating.

Six men were arrested on May 7, 2007, in New Jersey, as two of them were meeting a confidential government witness “to purchase three AK-47 automatic machine guns and four semi-automatic M-16s to be used in an attack they had been planning from at least January 2006,” according to a criminal complaint.

The sixth defendant, Agron Abdullahu, pleaded guilty in October to a reduced charge of providing firearms to illegal aliens and received a sentence of 20 months in prison and three years of supervised release.

Abdullahu told the court in October that, from January 2006 to May 2007, he and Turkish-born Serdar Tatar provided firearms to brothers Dritan Duka, Shain Duka and Eljvir “Elvis” Duka.

The Duka brothers, born in the former Yugoslavia, were in the United States illegally.

Tatar and Abdullahu are both legal U.S. residents. The other defendant, Jordanian-born Mohamad Ibrahim Shnewer, is the only U.S. citizen among them.

The alleged Fort Dix plot came to light when two men gave an 8 mm videotape to a clerk at a Circuit City store in Mount Laurel, New Jersey, and asked him to convert it to DVD format.

Authorities said the tape showed 10 young men shooting at a practice range and shouting in Arabic, “Allahu Akbar,” or “God is great.”