Al Qaida embassy bombers await sentencing

Four members of Osama bin Laden’s al Qaida organisation were being sentenced today just a few hundred yards from the World Trade Centre for their part in terrorist attacks in 1998.

The men, who include bin Laden’s former personal secretary, were convicted earlier this year for their part in the 1998 bombings of America’s embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, which killed 224 people, 12 of them Americans.

Today a ring of steel was being thrown around the New York courthouse where they are due to be sentenced by United States District Judge Leonard Sand for their roles in the attacks.

The court is within 500 yards of the site of the collapsed twin towers, and the four men are being held in a prison beside the court where they were reported to have cheered as they heard the sound of the towers collapsing.

They were convicted for their part in the almost simultaneous bombings of the embassies in Nairobi, the Kenyan capital, and Dar-es-Salaam, in Tanzania, on August 7, 1998.

All four were found guilty in taking part in a plot which prosecutors alleged was directed by bin Laden, who was indicted on charges of overseeing the bombings, leading to him becoming America’s most wanted fugitive.

Wadih El-Hage, 41, was found guilty of helping to direct the conspiracy. The US citizen, who lived with his wife and seven children in Texas, was bin Laden’s personal secretary in the early 1990s.

After settling in the Texas city of Arlington, he continued to co-ordinate the al Qaida organisation’s terrorist plots in Sudan and Kenya, and faces a maximum sentence of life in prison.

Also facing life is Mohamed Sadeek Odeh, 36, a Jordanian explosives expert who was found guilty of advising other bombers on how to make TNT.

The father-of-one was found to have TNT and PETN, a plastic explosive, on trousers, glasses and a T-shirt seized from him when he was arrested.

And Mohamed Rashed Daoud Al-Owhali, 24, and Khalfan Khamis Mohamed, 28, will be given mandatory life terms.

The two were convicted earlier this year of conspiracy to murder American citizens and escaped a death penalty when a jury failed to reach a unanimous verdict that they should be executed.

Mohamed, a Tanzanian, mixed TNT explosive and loaded it on to a truck which was driven to the American embassy in Dar-es-Salaam.

He fled to South Africa where he was arrested in 1999 and told detectives he would have joined in other attacks on America of he had not been caught.

Although his lawyers claimed he was a foot-soldier in a vast plot, he was found guilty of the most serious charges against him murder of American citizens.

Al-Owhali, a Saudi Arabian, was found guilty of murder for being a passenger in the truck used to deliver the bomb to the Nairobi embassy, and throwing a stun grenade to distract security guards.

Until the September 11 suicide hijackings, the embassy bombings were the worst attacks blamed on al Qaida and bin Laden.

The American embassy in Kenya was almost completely destroyed, with mostly local workers killed and the ambassador cheating death because she was in a meeting at a building across the street.

A fifth man accused of being a top lieutenant of bin Laden and a leader of the bombing plot, Mamdouh Mahmud Salim, is also due to go on trial for a further charge of attempting to murder a prison guard using a sharpened comb.

The 43-year-old Sudanese citizen, who is thought to be of Iraqi descent, had been due to go on trial on the attempted murder charge just days after the September 11 attacks, but the proceedings have been postponed until next year.

German authorities captured Salim in Munich in 1998 on charges he conspired to bomb the African embassies.

Prosecutors also allege Salim, while running front companies to purchase weaponry for al Qaida, tried to buy uranium, intending to build a nuclear bomb.