US gang member jailed for 17 years for terror support

JOSE PADILLA, a former Chicago gang member once accused by the Bush administration of plotting a radioactive bomb attack, was sentenced by a US court yesterday to 17 years and four months in prison for supporting terrorism.

He and two co-defendants were convicted in August on charges of conspiracy to murder, kidnap and maim people abroad, conspiracy to provide material support for terrorism, and providing material support for terrorism.

Co-defendant Adham Hassoun was sentenced to 15 years and eight months in prison and Kifah Jayyousi was sentenced to 12 years and eight months.

US District Judge Marcia Cooke noted: “There was no evidence the defendants had personally killed or maimed anyone.” She said: “The sentence will serve to inform others...conspiracy to support murder, maiming and kidnapping will not be tolerated in this country.”

Padilla, a Muslim convert turned al-Qaida recruit, was arrested in Chicago upon his return from abroad in 2002 and initially accused of wanting to detonate a radioactive, or “dirty,” bomb in a US city. President George W. Bush ordered the US military to hold him as an “enemy combatant” without charge, and Padilla was detained in isolation in a military brig for three-and-a-half years. After the US Supreme Court agreed to review whether he could be held without charge by presidential order, the US government turned him over to civilian authorities. The case tested US presidential authority in the terror war.

Defence lawyers argued Padilla had gone to Egypt to study Islam and Arabic. The main evidence against him was an application to attend an Afghan al-Qaida training camp.

Most of the trial focused on phone calls in which Hassoun and Jayyousi discussed picnics, vegetables and sporting events in the 1990s. Government witnesses said those were coded references to supplies and recruits for wars in Chechnya, Kosovo, Afghanistan and elsewhere. Lawyers for Hassoun, a Lebanese-born Palestinian computer programmer, and Jayyousi, a Jordanian-born US citizen and US navy veteran, argued they supported charities providing aid to Muslim victims of atrocities.