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| Home Front: WoT |
| Lodi trial set to begin |
| 2006-02-14 |
| Thirty-five miles south of the state capital, this quiet agricultural community best known for its annual grape festival and local wines has waited nine months to learn whether it also has been a home for terrorists. The trial is scheduled to begin Tuesday for a father and son who were among four members of the region’s Pakistani community arrested after a nearly three-year federal probe. It is expected to provide answers to Lodi residents who have worried about whether their town of 62,000 in the heart of California’s Central Valley harbored a network of terrorists. “Everyone was wondering, is there a terrorist cell?” Lodi Mayor Susan Hitchcock said. Two local imams were deported to Pakistan over immigration violations, leaving prosecutors to focus on a local ice cream vendor and his son. They are charged with lying to federal investigators about the younger man’s suspected attendance at an al-Qaida training camp and whether he was planning attacks inside the U.S. “I would imagine most people would like there to be more to the case than lying,” Hitchcock said. “But that’s not to minimize the fact that the younger man (allegedly) attended a terrorist training camp with an eye to harming American citizens.” Umer Hayat, 48, is charged with two counts of making false statements to FBI agents about his son attending a terrorist training camp in Pakistan and faces eight years in prison if convicted. His 23-year-old son, Hamid, is charged with three counts of making false statements to the FBI about attending the camp. The son also is charged with providing material support to terrorists. If convicted, he faces up to 31 years in prison. Jury selection is scheduled to begin Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Sacramento. The trial also is expected to show how the Lodi arrests fit into the federal government’s efforts to track down suspected terrorists on U.S. soil since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Nationwide, 407 people have been charged with domestic and foreign terrorism-related crimes since then, according to the U.S. Department of Justice. Of those, 228 have been convicted or pleaded guilty. There were 21 convictions in jury trials and 19 pleas last year, including serial bomber Eric Rudolph and confessed al-Qaida conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui, who is now on trial in Virginia. Federal investigators began examining the Pakistani community in and around Lodi shortly after the 2001 terror attacks. About 2,500 people of Pakistani descent call the area home, most descendants of laborers who began arriving in the early 1900s to work in the area’s orchards and packing plants. A government informant infiltrated the area’s Muslim community, and by August 2002 had the first recorded conversation with Hamid Hayat. It is among about 1,000 hours of recordings turned over to defense lawyers. The informant, believed to be a few years older than the younger Hayat, soon became so close to the family that he slept some nights in the Hayat’s modest home. In early 2003, investigators began focusing greater attention on Hamid Hayat, who was born in the U.S. but speaks little English. He spent half his life attending school and staying with relatives in Pakistan. He had held only marginal jobs by the time he turned 22, most recently working part-time at a fruit-packing plant. He left for Pakistan in April 2003, first attending a religious school operated by a relative in the Pakistani city of Rawalpindi. Between October 2003 and November 2004, he also attended an al-Qaida training camp outside the city, according to the federal indictment. The informant recorded Hamid Hayat in March and April 2003 when he was in the United States and again after Hayat arrived in Pakistan. The younger Hayat said he had been accepted at a camp that provided training in weapons and explosives and hand-to-hand combat, according to the indictment. He attempted to return to the U.S. in May 2005, but his flight was diverted to Japan after his name surfaced on the federal government’s “no fly” list. He was allowed to continue home but was questioned by federal authorities after he returned to Lodi. Prosecutors say Hamid Hayat failed a lie-detector test and admitted attending one terrorist camp for three days in 2000 and a second for three to six months in 2003 and 2004. They also say he described the location and layout of the second camp. Further, FBI agents say they found a book titled “Virtues of Jihad” during a search of his bedroom. Prosecutors claim Hamid Hayat returned to America last year determined to attack targets in the U.S., including hospitals and supermarkets. FBI agents arrested the father and son after questioning at the Sacramento FBI office in June. The Hayat family tells a different story. In interviews and court testimony, family members say Hamid Hayat was a rootless young man who so lacked direction and ambition that he was sent back to Pakistan in 2003 to find purpose and a wife. By the time he flew back to the United States in 2005, the young man was married and arranging to bring his new wife home. Umer Hayat’s brother, Umer Khatab, told a reporter last week in front of the family’s home that he couldn’t comment on the charges or the pending trial. The Hayats will be tried together but with separate juries because prosecutors say their confessions implicate each other in lying to FBI agents. Defense attorneys say their clients were pressured by investigators and should have had attorneys and interpreters present when they confessed. “When Umer Hayat told the FBI on several occasions that he did not know of any terrorist training camps and his son did not attend any terrorist training camps, those were true statements,” Umer Hayat’s attorney, Johnny Griffin III, said Monday. “Concerning additional statements he made, we will demonstrate to the jury the circumstances under which those statements were made and why they were made.” A mound of documents and recordings provided by prosecutors in recent days contain no smoking gun to prove otherwise, Griffin said. In Lodi, several residents say the town has returned to a normal pace in the nine months since the arrests. They said they plan to monitor the court proceedings carefully to see what evidence the government presents. “The neighborhood’s the same. It’s all peaceful again,” said Karina Murillo, who has lived steps away from the Hayats for two years, in a home rented from the Hayat family. “It’s hard for us to believe because we’ve known them. We never saw anything suspicious or anything until the FBI showed up.” |
| Posted by:Dan Darling |