Terror Trial Nears For Former Georgia Tech Student

Syed Haris Ahmed was a terrorist wannabe. He’s already admitted to that.

The former Georgia Tech student contemplated an attack on Dobbins Air Reserve Base, but didn’t carry it out. He traveled to Pakistan hoping to die a martyr fighting alongside brother jihadists — but changed his mind and returned home. He took almost laughably bad “casing videos” of Washington landmarks, taping surreptitiously through his pickup truck window in a city where tourists overtly take pictures of everything.

Syed Haris Ahmed agreed to a nonjury trial so he can deliver what he calls ‘the message of Islam’ during closing arguments.

Was he all talk? Or was he, as federal prosecutors suspect, a time bomb that simply hadn’t gone off yet?

On Monday, after three years in solitary confinement at the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary, Ahmed will stand trial for conspiracy to provide support for acts of terrorism in the United States and abroad. There will be no jury, and there seems little doubt about the verdict because during interviews with federal agents Ahmed helped outline the case against him.

Ahmed, 24, evinces scant concern about the judgment of a temporal court, saying the only laws that matter are the laws of Allah. He agreed to a bench trial so he can deliver what he calls “the message of Islam” during closing arguments.

“It is the duty of every Muslim to deliver the message of God to mankind,” he said in a neatly handwritten motion filed recently. “I hope that Allah will be pleased with this act of mine and forgive me on the Day of Judgment when only He will be the Judge of all mankind.”

In his motion, which quotes from the Quran, Ahmed said he cannot be a “true and loyal servant of God” by arguing for his acquittal because that would be tantamount to accepting the legitimacy of man-made laws.

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Jury Problems Surface During Florida Terror Trial

A few hours after an ill juror was replaced, a note signed by the jury foreman in the “Liberty City Six” case said a female juror “refuses to engage in discussions based on the evidence or the law” and that this could be “unfair to the defendants,” according to U.S. District Judge Joan Lenard. The note said the juror was disruptive and had made comments offensive to others.

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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.

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Seattle Militant To Testify In High-stakes Terror Trial

Ten years ago, on a dusty ranch in southern Oregon, one-time Seattle hustler and Muslim convert James Ujaama came close to having his head cut off by a Swede named Oussama Kassir.

Kassir, according to court documents, had come to Bly, Ore., on the orders of Abu Hamza al-Masri, a radical Islamic preacher and purported al-Qaida recruiter in London, to help Ujaama set up a Jihad training camp on U.S. soil.

Ujaama had promised Abu Hamza guns, recruits and terrain remarkably similar to Afghanistan. Kassir, a hardened Jihad fighter who claims he’s killed dozens in Afghanistan, Bosnia and Chechnya, was purportedly dispatched from London with another man and $12,000 in startup money.

What Kassir and his comrade found after their 7,000-mile trip were a couple of dilapidated trailers, a motley group of followers — including women and children — and a lot of big talk from Ujaama.

So Kassir, according to documents and eyewitness accounts, decided that he would kill Ujaama and bury him in Bly. Ujaama managed to keep his head.

But Kassir, a Lebanese-born Swedish citizen and engineer who once bragged that he was a bodyguard for Osama bin Laden, may wish he’d carried out the threat: This week, the 43-year-old Ujaama — now a federal felon — is expected to be the star witness against Kassir in a terrorism-related trial in U.S. District Court in New York.

For the first time, Ujaama will testify about a small group of militant Muslims in Seattle that he led. The group went from commandeering a small mosque in the Central District to becoming entangled in an alleged international terrorism plot.

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Swedish Man Accused Of Terrorism Faces New York Trial

Jury selection began on Monday in the trial of a Lebanese-born Swedish man accused of helping set up a militant training camp in rural Oregon and operating websites showing how to assemble bombs.

Oussama Abdullah Kassir, 43, who was extradited from the Czech Republic to New York in 2007, faces multiple charges, including supporting terrorism and al Qaeda, by attempting to set up the camp in Bly, Oregon from 1999 to early 2000.

Prosecutors say Kassir and two others involved in the case were followers of Egyptian-born Abu Hamza al-Masri, a one-armed Muslim cleric who is serving a seven-year sentence in Britain for inciting his followers to murder nonbelievers.

James Ujaama, a former community activist in Seattle, has pleaded guilty to trying to help al Qaeda militants and may testify at the trial in Manhattan federal court as part of a plea agreement.

The other suspect in the case, Haroon Rashid Aswat, one of Masri’s chief aides, is appealing against extradition to the United States.

via Swedish man accused of terrorism faces New York trial.

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.”

Former USF Student Sentenced To 15 Years In Terror Trial

Former University of South Florida student Ahmed Mohamed received a maximum 15-year federal prison sentence Thursday for providing material support to terrorists.

In court, U.S. District Judge Steven D. Merryday pondered the 27-year-old’s potential aloud, gazing at the former engineering doctoral student and teaching assistant who had once managed a 4.0 GPA.

“I still wonder why this young man in front of me at his age, at his intelligence, how he has become committed to this path,” Merryday said. Read more

Australia Extremists Accused Of Planning Violent Jihad

Five Muslim extremists planned terrorist acts in Australia in pursuit of “violent jihad” because they believed Islam was under attack worldwide, a court heard as their trial began Tuesday.

The Sydney men obtained or sought weapons and explosive materials and possessed extremist material venerating the work of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, prosecutor Richard Maidment told a Supreme Court jury.

He said the evidence would show the men were working together between July 2004 and their arrest in November 2005 “to prepare for the commission of one or more terrorist acts in Australia.”

The accused — Khaled Cheikho, Moustafa Cheikho, Mohamed Ali Elomar, Abdul Rakib Hasan and Mohammed Omar Jamal — have pleaded not guilty.

If convicted, the men — aged from 24 to 43 — face a maximum sentence of life imprisonment.

Raids on their homes found “large quantities of literature which supported indiscriminate killing, mass murder and martyrdom in pursuit of violent jihad,” Maidment said.

They had pictures and videos showing the hijacked aircraft smashing into the World Trade Centre in New York on September 11, 2001, as well as beheadings and death on the battlefield, he said.

Maidment described all five as devout Muslims who believed Islam was under attack throughout the world and that there was a religious obligation to come to its defence.

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