WASHINGTON — A suspected al-Qaeda militant accused in the deadly 1998 bombings of American embassies in Tanzania and Kenya will be tried in a civilian court in New York, making him the first Guantánamo Bay detainee to be tried in an American civilian court, the Justice Department said Thursday.“By prosecuting Ahmed Ghailani in federal court, we will ensure that he finally answers for his alleged role in the bombing of our embassies in Tanzania and Kenya,” Attorney General Eric Holder said in a statement.
The decision to try Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani in New York stemmed directly from the review ordered by President Obama in January of the cases of all 240 terror suspects held at the Guantánamo detention center. Mr. Obama is scheduled to give what the White House has billed as a major speech on the handling of the detainees on Thursday morning.
The administration has encountered unexpectedly stiff opposition to moving some of the detainees to the United States, including overwhelming votes in both the House and Senate to oppose appropriating funds to close the Guantánamo Bay detention center.
Mr. GhailaniÂ’s case is probably one of the easier one to bring to the forefront. He faces charges in a pre-Sept. 11 crime; no one charged with Sept. 11 crimes has yet been tried in an American civilian court. The case against him also appears well-developed. And New York City has experience with terrorist trials.
The indictment alleges that Mr. Ghailani helped purchase the Nissan truck and the oxygen and acetylene tanks used in the bombing of the United States embassy in Tanzania, and that he helped load boxes of TNT, cylinder tanks, detonators, fertilizer and other materials into the truck before the bombing.
He was captured in July 2004 and, in September 2006, transferred along with other “high value detainees” to Guantánamo Bay.
While he is the first Guantánamo detainee to be sent to the United States for trial, he is the second detainee under the Obama administration to be shifted to the civilian court system. Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri was taken from a South Carolina brig to Illinois and has already pleaded guilty without incident, eliminating the need for a trial.
Mr. Ghailani, who is believed to be in his mid-30s, appeared in 2007 before a military review panel at Guantánamo Bay. He claimed ignorance of the purpose of the 1998 attacks, which killed more than 200 people, and issued an apology. “It was without my knowledge what they were doing, but I helped them,” he said, according to a transcript. “I’m sorry for what happened to those families who lost, who lost their friends and their beloved ones.”
But he did acknowledge having once met Osama bin Laden, and also Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the senior Al Qaeda planner held at Guantánamo and the acknowledged mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks.
The charges facing him include murder, attacking civilians, destruction of property and conspiracy, as well as providing material support to terrorism.
Trying to calm concerns and retake the initiative in the detainee debate, President Obama is scheduled to give a major address on national security and on his philosophy about detaining terror suspects at Guantánamo at the National Archives on Thursday.
According to administration officials, he will contend that the Bush administration’s policies were an “ad hoc legal approach for fighting terrorism that was neither effective nor sustainable — a framework that failed to trust in our institutions, and that failed to use our values as a compass.”