In a Frankfurt hotel suite, a Yemeni sheik coached his assistant about how to speak in code and said he would funnel money to Al Qaeda, Hamas and "anyone we know of who is in the jihad field." That was the prosecution's translation of a secretly recorded conversation, mostly in Arabic, that the jurors in the terrorism-financing trial of the sheik were shown yesterday on videotape in Brooklyn federal court.The defense has challenged the translation. But the prosecution's case was bolstered by the sheik's own body language, which included at least one clumsy effort at secretiveness that could be seen clearly on the tapes. Just after what the prosecutors described as a discussion with two informers about whether a $2.5 million donation might be funneled to jihad, there was a knock on the door of the suite on Jan. 9, 2003. It might have been a maid at the door. On the courtroom monitors, the sheik, Mohammed Ali Hassan al-Moayad, could be seen bolting forward in his seat in Frankfurt. His hands darted to turn over a pile of papers on the coffee table. "Remove everything," the prosecutors' transcript quoted him as saying. According to the transcript, he offered his assistant and the two informers an explanation they could give to anyone who might ask what they were doing: "We translate the Koran."
Yesterday was the second day of the prosecution's presentation of the secretly recorded tapes that are the center of their terrorism-financing case against the sheik and his