By DPA
Washington : US citizen Jose Padilla, held for more than three years in a military prison without access to a lawyer, has been found guilty on charges of plotting an overseas terrorist jihad.
His two co-defendants – one Lebanese and the other a US citizen of Jordanian origin – were also found guilty.
The jury’s verdict in the five-year-long case was announced in a federal courtroom in Miami Thursday, where Padilla, Adham Amin Hassoun and Kifah Wael Jayyousi underwent a three-month trial, broadcast reports said.
They face possible sentences of life in prison, a decision to be made on Dec 5. Padilla has already spent five years in prison, at least three of them in the military prison before civil charges were filed.
The men were found guilty of conspiracy to murder, kidnap and maim individuals in a foreign country and providing material support to terrorists.
“All three of these men were part of a North American support network designed to send money, physical assets and recruits overseas to support violent jihad,” said Craig Morford, acting US attorney general, in Washington.
He said their North American network operated from many cities throughout the US and Canada to support Al Qaeda groups and their affiliates in waging violent jihad.
The US prosecutor’s main evidence against Padilla was a document he filled out to apply for an overseas Al Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan.
The defence argued that Padilla, a one-time gang member, simply went overseas to learn the Arabic language as a convert to Islam. His mother, Estella Lebron, said in broadcast remarks that the verdict would be appealed.
“My son would never kill someone… He wanted to go overseas to study Arabic,” she said.
A second defendant, Jordanian-born Jayyousi, 45, is a former Detroit Public Schools assistant superintendent and a former facilities director in the District of Columbia school system, according to a website dedicated to the rights of Islamic prisoners, www.cageprisoners.com.
The verdict represented a muted victory for the Bush administration, whose lawyers navigated a narrow legal path to add Padilla’s case to a standing case against Hassoun and Jayyousi.
Padilla was at the centre of a contentious legal debate for several years. The November 2005 indictment of Padilla and the others in a civilian court was a reversal of course for the White House, which has argued the US government could hold illegal combatants, as Padilla was classified, indefinitely without bringing charges.
Padilla, 36, was arrested in May 2002 at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport on charges of plotting with Al Qaeda to set off a radioactive device known as a “dirty bomb” in the United States.
But attorneys dropped initial plans to try Padilla independently for the plot after his three years of isolation in a US military prison without access to a lawyer or charges being filed. The denial of such rights to a US citizen could still be used to launch an appeal of Thursday’s guilty verdict, legal experts said.
US President George W. Bush declared Padilla an “enemy combatant” in 2002, a term used for many of the foreign prisoners with suspected links to terrorism at the Guantanamo Bay military facility on Cuba.
The White House changed course in the Padilla case shortly before the Supreme Court was scheduled to determine if it would hear Padilla’s case. The Bush administration has suffered several legal defeats before the Supreme Court in its handling of terrorist suspects.
Padilla alleges that he was tortured while in US custody, charges the government denies.
The indictment charged that Padilla travelled overseas to train as a terrorist with the intention of fighting in “violent jihad” and promoting a radical Islamic fundamentalist ideology that advocates using physical force and violence.
According to the Department of Homeland Security, Hassoun and Jayyousi were recruiters for several groups, including the American Islamic Group and the American Worldwide Relief Organization, and distributed two publications promoting violent jihad – “The Islam Report” and “Nida’ul Islam.”
“Cases like this one are central to the United States government’s efforts to neutralise the threat posed by terrorists and those who support them,” Morford said.