Mixed Picture of Suspect

A conflicting picture emerged Tuesday in the trial of a suspected terrorist accused of attending an Al Qaeda training camp in Pakistan and returning to the U.S. bent on jihad.

In a federal courtroom here, prosecutors read transcripts of conversations between an FBI informant and Hamid Hayat, suggesting that the 23-year-old Lodi resident despised the United States and embraced the idea of martyrdom.

But in tape-recorded telephone conversations, Naseem Khan, a paid government informant, accused Hayat of being “a loafer” after his arrival in Pakistan during the summer of 2003. Khan pressed him to “be a man” and fulfill his vow to attend a terrorist training camp.

“You’re sitting there, in Pakistan. You told me, ‘I’m going to a camp. I’ll do this, I’ll do that,’ ” said Khan, a 32-year-old Pakistani immigrant hired by the FBI in late 2001 and assigned to infiltrate Lodi’s Muslim community. “You’re sitting idle. You’re wasting time.”

Hayat was arrested shortly after returning to the United States in May 2005, based largely on the information supplied by Khan. He is charged with material support of terrorist activity and three counts of lying to FBI agents. He faces up to 39 years in prison.

Last week, jurors saw a videotaped interview in which Hayat admitted that he attended a terror training camp. Wazhma Mojaddidi, his attorney, has argued that Hayat was under duress after hours of grilling and had simply told the agents what he thought they wanted to hear.

Authorities charged Hayat’s father, 48-year-old Umer Hayat, last June with two counts of making false statements to the FBI about whether his son attended the camp.

He faces up to 16 years in prison. Opening statements in his portion of the trial are scheduled for next week. Both have pleaded not guilty.

So far, the government’s case has rested on confessions by the father and son -- and the secretly taped conversations between Khan and the younger Hayat.

Khan immigrated as a teenager but was awarded U.S. citizenship and earned about $250,000 after he became a government informant, according to defense attorneys. The FBI approached him while he was working at a fast-food restaurant in Bend, Ore.

In mid-2002, Khan arrived in Lodi at the behest of the FBI and quickly struck up a friendship with Hamid Hayat, sometimes spending the night at his family home.

Over hundreds of hours of conversations, Khan and Hayat talked about girls, cricket, quitting cigarettes and attending a wrestling match at the Arco Arena, but also about Pakistani politics and the Islamic holy war.

Khan told jurors that he worked to keep Hayat from putting up a wall: “I let him think he was better than me, and eventually he would open up and talk to me.”

He invariably led the conversation toward jihad.

Hamid Hayat talked in lofty terms about Islam, sometimes bragging about how much influence his family in Pakistan had among religious and political leaders. His grandfather’s fundamentalist Islamic school, Hayat told Khan, had been a seedbed for Taliban recruits.

Hayat called Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf “an infidel” because of his dealings with the U.S. government. Hayat also suggested that a radical Islamic party that he supported was lying low but would eventually “strike a blow of some kind.”

He also vowed to attend a terrorist camp when he arrived in Pakistan.

“I have one objective now,” he said. Hayat said he planned to stay with relatives a few weeks, “then I’m going for training.”

But after two months in Pakistan, Hayat sheepishly admitted to Khan in a taped phone conversation that he had yet to make the jump, suggesting that the camps were shut down and the madrassas, or religious schools, were riddled with spies.

In a July 2003 conversation, Khan browbeat Hayat with insults, calling him lazy and saying he was shirking his duty to family.