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| Home Front: WoT |
| Dix plot prosecutors direct jurors back to key evidence |
| 2008-11-26 |
| For most of the past two weeks, prosecutors at the trial of five suspected South Jersey terrorists watched defense attorneys hammer away at their star witness, an FBI informant who infiltrated the group. So when the two assistant U.S. Attorneys resumed their case yesterday, they tried to refocus jurors on some of their more compelling evidence. They showed photos of the defendants, some clad in camouflage garb, hoisting rifles and shooting at balloons that allegedly represented human heads. They presented agents who recalled shadowing the lead defendant, Mohamad Shnewer, one summer night as he drove himself three hours from Cherry Hill to Fort Monmouth, ostensibly to study it for an attack. And they played videos retrieved from Shnewer's computer that depicted U.S. troops and convoys under attack in Iraq and Afghanistan. At one point, Deputy U.S. Attorney William Fitzpatrick froze the footage on the courtroom screen to let jurors absorb the image of a face and name: Danny Dietz. Dietz was a Navy SEAL from Colorado who died during an ambush in the Afghanistan mountains in June 2005. With Islamic music in the background, the video first showed militants combing through charred or bloodied corpses of American servicemen, stealing their weapons, watches and personal items. Then one proudly displayed the take: a GPS device, a grenade-type weapon and Dietz's Navy identification. The videos represent a pillar of the prosecution case, sometimes stomach-turning images they say proved the men's deep hatred for the United States and helped prepare them to attack. Under questioning from the prosecutor, Thomas Falletta, a New Jersey State Police detective assigned to the case, testified that "at least 80 percent" of the 125 files retrieved from Shnewer's laptop contained videos depicting attacks on U.S. troops. The rest, he said, showed attacks against Russians or Israelis. Each time a video has been shown, the defense has quickly sought to neutralize its impact, pressing witnesses to point out that the videos aren't illegal and that there's nothing to tie the defendants to the violent acts on screen. Shnewer's attorney, Rocco Cipparone, noted during his cross-examination of Falletta yesterday that all but four or five of the videos on Shnewer's computer were downloaded in the summer of 2006. That was long after prosecutors contend Shnewer and the others hatched plans to attack Fort Dix or another local military site but around the same time that the FBI informant, Mahmoud Omar, kept pressing Shnewer to finalize his plans. Shnewer, 23, is a native of Jordan who drove a cab in Philadelphia and worked at his family's Pennsauken market. The other defendants include brothers Shain Duka, 27, Eljvir Duka, 25, and Dritan Duka, 30, Albanian roofers from Cherry Hill; and Serdar Tatar, 25, a Turk who worked at a Philadelphia convenience store. |
| Posted by:ryuge |
| #1 Nicely done. |
| Posted by: newc 2008-11-26 17:42 |