Opposing Views Open Terror Trial

A man suspected of terrorism arrested with a carload of explosives shortly before New Year’s Day 2000 is either a careless militant who left behind a trail of incriminating evidence or a naive “lost soul” who was used by extremists bent on attacking the United States, a federal jury was told Tuesday.

The different portraits of 33-year-old Ahmed Ressam emerged during opening statements in his trial in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles.

As Ressam sat and watched intently, federal prosecutor Steven Gonzalez laid out the government’s case against him, promising evidence he said would prove that Ressam is “guilty as the terrorist we have charged him to be.”

Gonzalez told jurors that prosecutors will present forensic evidence, a long paper trail of clues and even a credit card in one of Ressam’s aliases that was used to purchase bomb timing components and olive jars that were later filled with high-grade explosives.

The credit card was also used to rent a motel room where the explosives were prepared and to rent the Chrysler that Ressam used to ferry the explosives from Canada to Port Angeles, Wash., on the day he was arrested, Gonzalez said.

The prosecutor never mentioned Ressam’s alleged ties to worldwide terrorist leader Osama bin Laden, who intelligence officials say was behind the plot and several other planned attacks on or about the new year.

And Gonzalez conceded that authorities have never determined exactly what Ressam was planning to do with the explosives, because he was arrested after raising the suspicions of a U.S. Customs inspector at the U.S.-Canadian border the evening of Dec. 14, 1999.

“This case is a law enforcement success story,” Gonzalez said. “This is a case of tragedy averted, of apprehending a terrorist before he could blow something up.”

Until now, authorities had publicly cited only the Space Needle in Seattle and several airports in Southern California as potential targets. On Tuesday, Gonzalez told jurors the evidence includes a French language guidebook found in Ressam’s rental car that had his fingerprints on photographs of downtown Los Angeles and the Transamerica tower in San Francisco.

But, Gonzalez cautioned the jury, “it doesn’t really matter if what he intended to blow up was San Francisco, Los Angeles, Las Vegas or Poughkeepsie.”

“The man who had the bomb is sitting right there,” he said, pointing to Ressam, who sat at a table with his three public defenders. “The only questions are: Did he know it was there, and did he know what it was?”

In the coming weeks, Gonzalez said, he and two other prosecutors from the Seattle U.S. attorney’s office plan to prove not only that Ressam knew what was in the trunk of the car, but also that he took great pains to manufacture the explosives and then sneak them across the border and into the United States.

In her opening statement, Ressam defense lawyer Jo Ann Oliver did not dispute that Ressam drove the car containing about 130 pounds of high-grade explosives in the trunk, or even that his fingerprints had been found on some of the homemade timing devices.

But Oliver vowed to provide jurors with a true picture of Ressam as a harmless, naive person.

“This young man was and is a very quiet, very religious and probably a very gullible person. These virtues were his undoing,” Oliver said, as Ressam smiled sheepishly and stared down at his lap. “He was used and even abused by so-called friends and left alone in the United States.”

Oliver described how Ressam left the “atrocious” situation in his war-torn homeland of Algeria in the early 1990s, and ultimately sought political asylum in Canada. As Ressam fought for the right to stay in Canada, he unwittingly allowed himself to be befriended and manipulated by fellow Algerians who were political extremists and perhaps even terrorists, his lawyer said.

“He was somewhat of a lost soul; he gravitated to them,” Oliver said. “They prayed together. They played soccer together.”

Oliver told the jurors that one of those “so-called friends who was always with him” was a fellow Algerian native named Abdelmajid Dahoumane, who authorities say spent three weeks in a Vancouver motel room with Ressam manufacturing the explosives that were later found in Ressam’s rental car.

Dahoumane was indicted along with Ressam and remains a fugitive with a $5-million U.S. bounty on his head. Oliver told jurors of Dahoumane’s status, and said he was the one who told Ressam what to do, kept him in the dark about the true nature of the conspiracy and then sent Ressam on his way.

Dahoumane, for instance, accompanied Ressam on a ferry ride from Vancouver all the way to the ferry station on Vancouver Island. But instead of crossing over on the ferry to the United States with Ressam, Dahoumane “disappeared.”

And while Ressam’s fingerprints were found all over the Vancouver motel where the two spent three weeks together, Dahoumane somehow kept his fingerprints off everything, Oliver said.

There should be another chair at the defendant table for Dahoumane, Oliver said. “But his seat will be empty.”