In what the U.S. Justice Department has described as a crucial terrorism trial, an Arab-American student from Virginia was convicted of plotting with operatives of Al Qaeda to assassinate President George W. Bush and hijack airplanes.
A jury on Tuesday in Alexandria, Virginia, found Ahmed Omar Abu Ali guilty on nine charges of conspiracy to commit acts of terrorism. The jury rejected the defendant's accounts that his Saudi captors beat and tortured him into confessing.
Abu Ali, 24, a U.S. citizen who is the son of a Jordanian father and who grew up in northern Virginia, faces the possibility of life in prison. He is scheduled to be sentenced by Judge Gerald Bruce Lee of the U.S. District Court on Feb. 17.
The Justice Department has seen the case as an important test of its ability to use foreign intelligence sources for a criminal case in an American court.
Paul McNulty, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, said after the verdict that Abu Ali had posed "a grave threat to our national security." He said the defendant had scouted nuclear plants in the United States at the behest of his Qaeda confederates, and was engaged in a hijacking plot that was "substantially similar to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks."
But no evidence was presented to show that any plot had reached an operational stage. And the defense said Abu Ali was just an American student who went to Saudi Arabia to pursue his religious studies.
"If he's the most dangerous guy they have, then we're very lucky," the defense lawyer, John Zwerling, said early on, "because I don't believe he's very dangerous at all."
Prosecutors maintained that Abu Ali went to Saudi Arabia in 2002 with the idea of becoming a terrorist because he saw Bush as "the leader of the infidels" and eventually met a high-ranking leader of Al Qaeda. McNulty said terrorists trained the defendant in weapons, explosives and document forgery.
Abu Ali was arrested at a university in Medina, Saudi Arabia, in June 2003 as the Saudi authorities were investigating a wave of bombings.
What happened next is at the heart of the case.
Prosecutors said Abu Ali willingly confessed to joining Al Qaeda and engaging in various terrorist plots, including one to personally kill Bush. Defense lawyers suggested that their client was falsely implicated by terrorists to protect cell members still at large, and that Saudi security forces extracted a confession after brutalizing him for 40 days.
Abu Ali testified in a pretrial hearing that his captors repeatedly whipped his back, kicked him in the stomach and yanked on his beard to obtain a videotaped confession in which he said he joined Al Qaeda because he hated the United States for its support of Israel. Abu Ali did not testify at the trial.