6 Men Charged in 9/11 Inquiry

Grand juries in Seattle and Detroit charged six alleged Islamic militants Wednesday with supporting global terrorist activities, including a U.S. citizen accused of providing safe houses and training to Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda network.

The indictments escalate the legal battle against terrorism, bringing to nine the number of alleged terrorists charged in U.S. courts since the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

One of the men charged Wednesday, James Ujaama of Seattle, was the second American indicted as a result of the Sept. 11 investigation. The other, John Walker Lindh, pleaded guilty last month to taking up arms as a Taliban soldier and was sentenced to 20 years in prison.

“The material support for terrorism has to be regarded as serious as terrorism itself,” said Charles Mandigo, the head of the FBI’s Seattle field office, where Ujaama was investigated and indicted. All but one of the men were in custody.

There was no coordination between the separate prosecutorial actions, authorities said, but they came after months of growing controversy over the Justice Department’s continued detention of suspects held since Sept. 11 without having charges filed against them. Even so, Justice Department officials in Washington had little to say, citing a gag order in one of the cases and the continuing counter-terrorism investigations.

“We have to let the indictments speak for themselves,” one Justice Department official said.

Both indictments were voluminous, and alleged that militants nestled within the Islamic communities of those cities operated “sleeper cells” that had been plotting to help launch terrorist attacks here and overseas as part of a jihad, or holy war, against the United States and its allies.

When they were arrested, the men named in the Detroit indictment had in their possession “surveillance” videotape footage of Disneyland in California and the MGM Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, the indictment said.

Also Wednesday, authorities in Germany indicted a man already in custody there on charges of aiding the 19 hijackers in the Sept. 11 attacks.

Justice Department officials said Wednesday that they were trying to get more information about that case against Mounir Motassadeq, a 28-year-old Moroccan who lived in Hamburg along with several of the hijackers. They declined to elaborate, as they may try to extradite and prosecute Motassadeq, who will face trial in Germany first because of what officials there described as “his participation in the terror attacks.”

In Seattle, a federal grand jury indicted Ujaama on charges of providing the Al Qaeda terrorist network with “training, facilities, computer services, safe houses, and personnel” as part of a conspiracy to “destroy property and murder and maim persons located outside the United States.”

Ujaama told associates he had attended Al Qaeda training camps, the indictment said.

Ujaama, 36, was accused in the two-count indictment of trying to set up a “jihad training camp” in rural Oregon in 1999 and of leading discussions there and in Seattle about the need “to attend violent jihad training camps in Afghanistan.”

The indictment alleged that Ujaama talked about how to poison an unsuspecting public, commit armed robberies, build underground bunkers to hide weapons and firebomb cars.

His attorney, Daniel Sears, accused the government of abusing its authority by holding Ujaama for more than a month as a material witness. Ujaama, who was taken into custody July 22, repeatedly has denied having ties to terrorism.

“If I have broken any laws and am guilty of crimes against the American people, then I must be held accountable,” Ujaama said in a statement Tuesday. “The fact is that I am innocent of any wrongdoing and am fully prepared to face my accusers and defend myself in a court of law.”

Born James Earnest Thompson, Ujaama is one of two brothers from Seattle who converted to Islam and, according to the FBI, became militants bent on aiding terrorists. He has spent much of the last few years in Denver and London, where he became a follower of Sheik Abu Hamza Al Masry, a radical Muslim cleric suspected of being a major Al Qaeda recruiter, according to FBI documents.

The FBI suspects that Ujaama provided Al Qaeda and the ruling Taliban regime in Afghanistan with laptop computers and other assistance before Sept. 11 as well.

In its indictment of Ujaama, the grand jury detailed the activities of three unnamed co-conspirators who have not been charged. U.S. law enforcement officials identified the men as Abu Hamza and two associates, and said that they are under active investigation for plotting terrorist attacks as well.

In the Detroit indictment, the five men face charges of conspiracy to provide material support or resources to a terrorist organization linked to Al Qaeda.

The men, whom authorities say have lived in the United States since at least 2000, were charged with operating a “sleeper” cell that operated as “a covert underground support unit for terrorist attacks within and outside the United States.”

The men were identified as Karim Koubriti, Ahmed Hannan, Farouk Ali-Haimoud, Youssef Hmimssa and a fifth man, known only as Abdella, with several aliases but no known given name. All but Hmimssa were accused of forming an agreement to provide a variety of services to a terrorist organization known only as “the brothers”--a common term among jihadists for supporters of the militant cause.

The men, all from North African countries, were accused of trying to “directly access airlines” by finding security breaches at Detroit Metropolitan Airport. Some worked in the kitchen of an airline catering firm, while others were experts in the use of fake IDs and calling cards. At least one received funds and consulted with a network of other “brothers” in Europe linked to a fundamentalist Islamic religious movement called Salafiyya, the indictment said.

The men conspired to help Islamic militants here and abroad in a jihad that would have included terrorist attacks in the United States, Jordan, Turkey and other countries allied with the U.S., the indictment said. Specifically, it said the men conspired to cause economic harm to U.S. businesses and to provide personnel, indoctrination, recruitment and training, safe houses, mail drops, “intelligence target data collection,” weapons, false documentation and identification and other covert assistance.

The men were charged with four counts of providing material support to terrorists, conspiracy to engage in fraud and misuse of visas, permits and other identification documents and related charges.

Four of the men were held soon after Sept. 11, while the man identified as Abdella remains a fugitive.

The indictment did not spell out any specific charges against Hmimssa because he is cooperating in the investigation, a federal law enforcement official said.

Efforts to reach lawyers for the men were unsuccessful.

In addition to the six suspects indicted Wednesday and Lindh, two other men have been charged in U.S. terrorism-related cases. Zacarias Moussaoui, a French citizen of Moroccan descent, faces trial Jan. 6 as the only person charged in the United States in direct connection with the Sept. 11 attacks, and Richard C. Reid, a Briton accused of trying to blow up a plane by detonating explosives in his shoes, is to go on trial Nov. 3.

Two other U.S. citizens, Yaser Esam Hamdi and Jose Padilla, are being held in military lock-ups as “enemy combatants.”