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Pakistan sentences 5 American Muslims to prison on terror charges

25 June 2010 02:47 (UTC +04:00)

Baku-APA. Five young American Muslims who Pakistani police said left their homes and families in suburban Virginia last fall to link up with extremist groups in Pakistan were convicted in Sargodha on Thursday on charges of plotting terror attacks on Pakistani soil and sentenced to 10 years in prison, APA reports quoting Los Angeles Times.

Although the five men had claimed in the past that they only wanted to carry out humanitarian work in war-torn Afghanistan, Pakistani authorities alleged that the group had clear targets in mind in Pakistan, including an air force base in the western Punjab city of Mianwali and a nuclear power plant in Chashma, another western Punjab city.

Their story appeared to be just one in a series of recent cases involving young American Muslims who had left America to seek out links with militant groups in Pakistan. In the case of Faisal Shahzad, the training that the 30-year-old Pakistani American received from Taliban militants in Pakistan’s tribal areas culminated in his alleged botched attempt to detonate a car bomb in the middle of New York’s Times Square earlier this year.

Another U.S. citizen of Pakistani descent, Chicagoan David Headley, pleaded guilty in March to helping Pakistani militants scout out targets ahead of the 2008 attacks in the Indian city of Mumbai that killed 166 people.

The five men, all U.S. citizens, lived within blocks of one another in Alexandria, Va. U.S. anti-terrorism officials said they believed the leader of the group was Ramy Zamzam, 22, an Egyptian-born dental student at Howard University. The other men accused were Umer Farooq Chaudhry, 24, born in Pakistan and a naturalized U.S. citizen; Waqar Khan, 22, a Pakistani American; Amin Hassan Yemer, 18, of Ethiopian descent; and Ahmad Abdullah Minni, 20, the son of Ethiopian immigrants.

Experts who had followed the case of the five young men from Virginia doubted that the group posed a serious threat because they had set out without any distinct plan in mind. When they arrived in Pakistan, they sought to join up with two Pakistani militant groups â€” Jaish-e-Mohammed and Lashkar-e-Taiba â€” but were turned away.

Pakistani prosecutors, however, said they had strong evidence that the men were working with a wanted Pakistani militant commander and that their intent to carry out a terrorist attack inside Pakistan was clear. They cited extensive exchanges of e-mails between the five Americans and a highly sought-after Pakistani militant known as "Saifullah," as well as maps they had in their possession of the power plant in Chashma and the air force base.

Prosecutor Nadeem Cheema said his team’s case also was bolstered by evidence of money that the five men had given Pakistani militant groups, including Jaish-e-Mohammed and Jamaat ud-Dawa, a group that Western nations had asserted was a front for Lashkar-e-Taiba, the group believed to be behind the Mumbai attacks. Cheema acknowledged that the amounts of money given were small â€” $11 to $23 from each defendant â€” but said, under Pakistani law, any amount given to a known militant group was a crime.

The ruling was handed down by an anti-terrorism court here in Sargodha, the central Pakistani city where the men were captured late last year. The judge who delivered the verdict did not explain his ruling, said Rana Bakhtiar, deputy prosecutor general for Punjab province. Though Bakhtiar said he was happy with the verdict, he added that prosecutors would appeal to the provincial high court to seek a harsher sentence.

Defense lawyer Hasan Dastagir Katchela said he was stunned by the verdict and would file an appeal. Katchela claimed that all of the evidence against the five Americans was fabricated and that they were tortured by investigators into making incriminating statements. Katchela said police had slapped and kicked the men and denied them sleep, as well as food and water.

"I was never expecting that they’d be convicted," Katchela said. "The evidence speaks so loudly in favor of an acquittal that no one could ever think of their conviction."