| Submit your comments on this article |
| Home Front: WoT |
| U.S. begins third effort to convict six in Liberty City terror case |
| 2009-02-19 |
| In the government’s third effort to convict six Miami men of planning to blow up the Sears Tower in Chicago as part of an Islamic jihad, federal prosecutors Wednesday portrayed the group’s ringleader as a man obsessed with overthrowing the United States government. In her opening argument, Assistant United States Attorney Jacqueline Arango told jurors that the ringleader, Narseal Batiste, was a “power-hungry vicious man who wanted to make his mark on the world.” The prosecution has failed twice to convince juries that Mr. Batiste and his followers were serious supporters of terror, with both trials ending in hung juries. Mr. Batiste and five co-defendants face four counts each, including conspiracy to provide material support for terrorism and to wage war against the United States, or sedition. A seventh suspect, Lyglenson Lemorin, was acquitted after the first trial ended in December 2007. Prosecutors said the government would show how the 34-year-old Mr. Batiste recruited the other five defendants to form a “paramilitary and cultlike group” that trained in martial arts and met in a ramshackle warehouse in an impoverished Miami neighborhood known as Liberty City. It was there and at other locales in South Florida, Ms. Arango said, that an F.B.I. informant posing as a member of Al Qaeda met with Mr. Batiste and his followers to discuss providing money and weapons for his group in exchange for helping Al Qaeda carry out attacks in South Florida and elsewhere. While posing as a member of Al Qaeda from Yemen, the informant also secretly videotaped the suspects taking an oath of allegiance to the terror group. In a shift from the first two trials, Ms. Arango appeared to be trying to draw attention to Mr. Batiste’s admiration for a former Chicago gang leader, Jeff Fort, who in 1987 was convicted of conspiring with the Libyan government to carry out terrorist attacks on American soil. Mr. Fort had been mentioned in the earlier trials, but not in opening arguments. On Wednesday, Ms. Arango noted that the informant had secretly recorded Mr. Batiste identifying himself with Mr. Fort and that Mr. Batiste mentioned the Fort case in detail in his first meeting with the informant in a hotel room in December 2006. Mr. Batiste’s lawyer argued that the informant entrapped Mr. Batiste and his followers with the promise of thousands of dollars. “This case is a 100 percent setup; this is a manufactured crime,” the lawyer, Ana M. Jhones, said in her opening argument, which drew several objections from the prosecution, most notably when she remarked that “taking an oath to Al Qaeda is not a crime. |
| Posted by:ryuge |