Jury in Lodi Case Asks to See Video

The jury deliberating the case of a Lodi man accused of attending a terrorist training camp in Pakistan asked Thursday to review the five-hour videotaped interrogation by FBI agents that prosecutors call a confession and defense attorneys say is “meaningless” intimidation.

U.S. District Judge Garland E. Burrell ordered the entire videotape replayed in open court on Monday, ensuring that the jury for 23-year-old Pakistani American Hamid Hayat will not reach a verdict until later next week.

A separate jury assigned to the defendant’s father, Lodi ice-cream truck driver Umer Hayat, 48, began its deliberations late Thursday afternoon before retiring for the day. The father is accused of lying to the FBI about his son’s alleged attendance at a training camp in late 2003.

In addition to the charge of “providing material support” to terrorists, Hamid Hayat is also charged with three counts of lying to federal agents. The younger Hayat faces up to 39 years in prison. His father faces 16 years.

In each case, videotaped interrogations by the FBI in marathon sessions on June 4-5, 2005, form the government’s primary evidence.

But because both defendants exercised their 5th Amendment rights against self-incrimination, the alleged confession of the father cannot be heard by the son’s jury and vice versa. As a result, separate juries are hearing the cases, which began eight weeks ago.

In addition to creating a logistical nightmare for the judge as he shuffles the “Hamid jury” or the “Umer jury” -- and sometimes both juries -- in and out of the federal courtroom, it has also produced a situation in which the evidence presented in the parallel cases is sometimes very different and even contradictory.

For example, in the Hamid Hayat case the government produced satellite images of an installation near Balakot in Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province where, during his interrogation, the younger Hayat said he received training.

However, in the father’s confession, the government placed the training camp more than 100 miles away in Punjab Province, near the city of Rawalpindi, home of Pakistan’s military headquarters.

As a result, the satellite images were shown to the son’s jury and not to the father’s.

Defense attorney Johnny L. Griffin, who represents Umer Hayat, alluded to this key difference in his closing arguments Thursday.

“Did you see any satellite images of the camp that Hamid went to?” Griffin asked the father’s jury. “If they had them, they would have shown them to you. Where’s the camp?”

In a relatively low-key closing by Assistant U.S. Atty. Robert Tice-Raskin, the government contended that Umer Hayat “admitted, and admitted repeatedly, that his son had attended a camp and that [Umer Hayat] had, in fact, visited a number of jihadist facilities himself.”

Griffin countered by attacking the motivation and credibility of Naseem Khan, the onetime Bend, Ore., convenience store clerk hired by the FBI to spy on Muslims in Lodi and record their conversations.

The informant, Griffin said, lied from the very first moment he met FBI agents in Oregon in October 2001, when he said he spotted several senior Al Qaeda figures worshiping at the mosque in Lodi, where Khan lived in 1998 and 1999.

Griffin said the FBI knew Khan was lying and hired him anyway.

“They continued to use him, pay him and rely on him,” Griffin said.

Toward the end of his closing argument, Umer Hayat’s wife, wearing a head scarf, and his two younger children walked into the courtroom for the first time during the trial.