Lodi Man Said Hospitals and Markets Were Possible Targets

Hospitals, supermarkets and other “big buildings” in California were among the possible terrorist targets of a Lodi man charged with attending an Al Qaeda camp in Pakistan, according to a videotaped interrogation played for jurors Tuesday.

In snippets of Hamid Hayat’s interview, he told FBI agents that he was awaiting orders to strike buildings in Los Angeles and perhaps San Francisco after he returned to the United States last year.

He said the targets might include “big buildings, like finance buildings, banks, stores.” When asked to be specific, Hayat, 23, told the agent he meant food stores.

“Why would you hit a food store?” the agent asked on the videotape.

“I think just to hurt people,” Hayat responded.

The roughly 10 hours of interrogation were videotaped last June and seem to bolster the government’s charges that Hayat attended the camp in 2003, returned to the U.S. to carry out attacks and then lied to the FBI.

He faces up to 39 years in prison if convicted of the charges -- three counts of making false statements and providing material support to terrorists.

Hayat, however, contradicted himself throughout the FBI questioning and at times struggled to explain his involvement in the camp. That could help his defense lawyers, who say he is prone to exaggeration and never actually attended the terrorist training camp.

Defense attorney Wazhma Mojaddidi said during opening statements last week that her client simply told investigators what he thought they wanted to hear.

On the videotape that prosecutors played to jurors Tuesday, FBI agents are seen pressing Hayat about his plans once he returned from Pakistan. At one point they ask him what targets he had been trained to strike in the U.S.

“Hospitals, maybe,” Hayat answered.

“Did they say hospitals?” an FBI agent asked.

“Maybe, I’m not sure,” Hayat said.

Hayat said he was to be contacted about what buildings to strike. When asked where the attacks would occur, he replied, “I think Los Angeles, maybe San Francisco.”

Hayat and his father, 48-year-old Umer Hayat, were arrested last June after a roughly three-year investigation into the Pakistani community in Lodi, an agricultural town of 62,000 about 35 miles south of Sacramento. Umer Hayat is charged with lying about whether his son attended the camp and faces up to 16 years in prison if convicted. Both are U.S. citizens and have pleaded not guilty to the charges.

Tuesday was the second day of testimony in the younger Hayat’s trial in U.S. District Court. He became the focus of the FBI’s investigation in Lodi in January 2003, after he befriended a paid government informant who was secretly recording their conversations.

Prosecutors say Hamid Hayat left for Pakistan in May 2003 and returned to the United States two years later to await orders for carrying out attacks. Government documents filed in Washington, D.C., previously identified the possible targets as supermarkets and hospitals.

On the videotape, Hamid Hayat is seen being questioned by a series of FBI agents who came in and out of the interrogation room at regional FBI headquarters in Sacramento. Hayat appeared nervous, jiggling his knees and tucking his hands between tightly crossed legs, and often gave conflicting answers.

For example, he said houses in the training camp were mud huts, then later said they were multi-story buildings. He said trainees shot at targets marked with a bull’s-eye, and later said they aimed at dummies made to look like American leaders.

He even gave varying accounts of the number of trainees at the camp -- from 35 to 200 -- and about whether they spoke only Urdu or also Pashto and English.

At one point, Hamid Hayat was unable to point to the camp’s location after agents showed him a map of Pakistan. Asked another time for the camp’s location, Hayat said, “The final thing I’ll say was in Afghanistan.”

A frustrated FBI agent later told Hayat he wasn’t being cooperative.

Mojaddidi, the defense attorney, said Hamid Hayat might have bragged about attending the camp to the FBI informant and might even have made incriminating statements to agents during his interrogation. But she said the government has no hard evidence that he actually attended any camp.