Two Guilty in Terrorism Trial

A federal court jury in Detroit convicted two North African immigrants on terrorism and conspiracy charges Tuesday in the first major criminal trial stemming from the investigations after the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

The jury acquitted two other North African men of being part of what prosecutors contended was a domestic “sleeper cell,” convicting one of them on lesser charges and exonerating another altogether.

The verdicts brought to a close a 10-week trial that marked the first test of the Bush administration’s courtroom efforts to prosecute suspected terrorists in the United States. Before Tuesday, suspects in other high-profile terrorism prosecutions in Lackawanna, N.Y., and Seattle had pleaded guilty, allowing the government to gain convictions without having to prove the cases in court.

The Detroit arrests of the four men, who are from Morocco and Algeria, came just six days after the Sept. 11 attacks. Agents found them while searching the former apartment of another terrorist suspect.

It was a time of heightened alert in the nation, and agents immediately suspected that they had closed down a “sleeper cell” when their search of the suspects’ low-rent apartment turned up videotapes depicting scenes of Disneyland and the MGM Grand casino in Las Vegas, a map and a day planner notebook -- all of which authorities deemed to be surveillance material for future attacks.

Indeed, Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft publicly suggested at the time that the men might have had advance knowledge of the Sept. 11 plot, although his office later acknowledged that there was no proof of that.

Found guilty were Abdel-Ilah Elmardoudi, 37, and Karim Koubriti, 24, both convicted of conspiracy to provide material support or resources to terrorists, and of conspiring to engage in fraud and misuse of visas, permits and other identification documents.

Elmardoudi faces 15 to 20 years in prison, and Koubriti, who was acquitted on some of the fraud charges, could be sentenced to 10 years, officials said.

Ahmed Hannan, 34, was acquitted of terrorism and terrorism conspiracy charges, but found guilty on the lesser identification fraud charges; he could receive five years in prison.

Farouk Ali-Haimoud, 22, was acquitted of all charges. He wept after the jury left the courtroom.

The mixed verdicts spawned a wide range of emotions.

“My client feels lousy; he’s devastated,” Elmardoudi’s defense attorney, William Swor, said in an interview. “Really, he’s not a terrorist.”

At the home of Ali-Haimoud’s family in Detroit, there was jubilation over his acquittal.

“My mother and I are very, very happy,” said his sister Sara Duessoum. “He’s going to come home and we’re going to talk and have fun.”

In Washington, Ashcroft issued a statement saying, “Every victory in the courtroom brings us closer to our ultimate goal of victory in the war on terrorism.” He made no mention of Ali-Haimoud’s acquittal.

The jury, dealing with a sprawling legal case and multiple defendants, deliberated for seven days before reaching a verdict Tuesday morning.

In a four-paragraph statement written by jury members and read by U.S. District Judge Gerald E. Rosen in court, the jurors acknowledged that “this was a very complex case which presented challenging issues and questions of fact.”

The jurors said they “worked very hard in their deliberations and went through all of the evidence presented by both sides carefully and thoroughly.”

Government attorneys said that before immigrating to this country in February 1998, Koubriti, Ali-Haimoud and Hannan agreed to call themselves ikhwan, or “brothers,” and vowed to prepare for attacks around the world. The three lived together in Detroit and nearby Dearborn. When the three were arrested, they said they were new in town and worked at restaurants. Elmardoudi, meanwhile, lived in Minnesota, and authorities believe he supervised the group’s alleged terrorist plots.

The government’s case against the men rested on two foundations -- the material found in the Detroit apartment, and five days of testimony from a fifth man who said he broke off his relationship with the defendants because he feared for his safety.

The defense said the material discovered inside the apartment had been left there by the previous occupant. But FBI agents and prosecutors told the jury that it was used by the defendants as surveillance tools in scouting upcoming targets against the United States.

While the videotapes showed scenes of Disneyland and the MGM Grand Casino, the day planner, discovered in a suitcase in a closet, allegedly outlined other locations. The map was believed to be a blueprint of the flight line at a U.S. airbase in Turkey.

During the trial, Paul George, an FBI expert on terrorism, told the jury that one 90-minute tape was a “repository of intelligence” for terrorists planning to attack America.

The tape begins with a video pan of a busy highway in Anaheim, shot from a hotel room with a view partly obscured by a tree. George noted that the hotel window could have been viewed as a future sniper’s perch, and added that some of the detainees being held at the U.S. Naval Base on Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, have talked about staging sniper attacks against possible U.S. targets.

While much of the tape appears to be tourist-type footage, one shot inside Disneyland includes a voice-over in Arabic: “This place is a graveyard.”

Also testifying for the government was Lt. Col. Mary E. Peterson, an Air Force counter-terrorism expert stationed at the Incirlik base in Turkey. She said she readily identified the map.

“It was apparent to me upon looking at it that it was depicting airfield operations,” she said.

The former friend, Youssef Hmimssa, emerged as the government’s chief witness. A Moroccan like three of the defendants (Ali-Haimoud is from Algeria), the 32-year-old Hmimssa testified that the group had once drawn up elaborate plans that included firing Stinger missiles at commercial airplanes.

He described the men as steeped in anti-U.S. and anti-Israel rhetoric. Hannan considered Las Vegas the “city of Satan,” he testified, and Elmardoudi once vowed that “pretty soon, what is happening in West Bank and Gaza is going to happen here.”

Under cross-examination by defense attorneys, however, Hmimssa’s credibility suffered. He conceded that he has used many aliases and often hopscotched around the world, carrying phony visas and other identification papers. From the witness stand, he admitted that he was a “crook” and a “scam artist.”

In the middle of the trial he pleaded guilty to 10 felony counts, including credit card fraud and possessing phony documents; he ultimately could serve nearly four years in prison.

But Hmimssa also held to his assertion that he feared for his life when he said he learned more about his former friends and onetime roommates. “I was scared, I wanted to move out,” he testified.

Richard Convertino, one of the assistant federal prosecutors who tried the case, told the jury not to buy into the defense claim that they were victims of questionable materials left in the apartment by someone else.

“This is not a case about young Arab males coming to the U.S. to live the American dream,” he said. “It is not about being in the wrong place at the wrong time. This is a case about dedication, deceit and deception.”

U.S. Atty. Jeffrey G. Collins in Detroit said after the verdicts that the convictions of Elmardoudi and Koubriti were “an important victory in the ongoing war against terrorism.” He too did not mention the acquittals.

Ironically, the man authorities had gone to the apartment to question, Nabil al Marabh, was later located in Chicago and arrested as an illegal immigrant but never criminally connected to any terrorist plots.

The three convicted defendants in Detroit are expected to be sentenced in several months.

In the Detroit area, which has one of the largest concentrations of Arab Americans in the country, the trial was watched closely.

Rana Abbas, spokeswoman for the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee in Dearborn, said the community saw the trial as proof that terrorism defendants will be given due process in the courts.

But, she added, “the negative side is that the evidence was circumstantial and not very solid against the two who were convicted” of terrorism.