Word: abdel
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Although that suspicion was not new, Attorney General Janet Reno had decided two months ago that there was not enough evidence against Sheik Abdel Rahman. When New York politicians angrily protested against letting him walk around free, the best Reno and U.S. Attorney Mary Jo White could think of was to arrest him on a charge of violating immigration laws. Federal authorities say no startling piece of new evidence or major new witness knitted their case together. Rather, they assert, good police work did it: the sifting and analysis of many bits of information gradually filled out a picture...
...Thursday all 15 defendants were marched, handcuffed and in single file, into a courtroom in lower Manhattan, where they entered pleas of not guilty. The courtroom was packed with security men, since three Egyptian extremist organizations had vowed "revenge" if Abdel Rahman is harmed. Defense lawyers accused the government of conflating rumors and suspicions into a fantasy conspiracy to whip up a new kind of cold war hysteria, substituting Islamic fundamentalism for communism as the enemy...
...more important, however, are tapes recording 150 hours of conversation between various defendants and Emad Salem, who was simultaneously Sheik Abdel Rahman's bodyguard and an FBI informer. Salem is not named in the indictment but is obviously the "person known to the grand jury" who is referred to time and again. He allegedly was recruited into the conspiracy in November 1991, and helped plot bombings...
Defense lawyers further insist that there is no evidence directly linking + some defendants, especially Abdel Rahman, to specific crimes. The Sheik's ferocious tirades against enemies of Islam, they say, cannot be equated with inciting followers to kill. Ron Kuby, lawyer for two defendants, poses a novel analogy: "Why wasn't the Pope taken into custody when he visited Denver? He is the spiritual leader of abortion-clinic bombers and doctor killers...
Under those rules, the government need not prove that Abdel Rahman directly ordered his followers to blow up any targets. It may be enough to show, as the indictment charges, that he "provided instruction regarding whether particular acts of terrorism were permissible or forbidden ((under Islamic law, presumably)), served as a mediator of disputes among members of the organization, and undertook to protect the organization from infiltration by law-enforcement authorities...