US judge upholds verdict against Guantanamo detainee
By DPA, IANSFriday, January 21, 2011
NEW YORK - The US judge who presided over the first civilian trial of a Guantanamo detainee has rejected a defence request to toss out the single-count guilty verdict against Ahmed Ghailani, news reports said Friday.
A jury last year found Ghailani guilty of only one count and exonerated him of 284 others sought by US prosecutors. The jury said Ghailani had knowledge and willingly participated in the bombings of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, which killed 224 people, including 12 Americans.
Judge Lewis Kaplan, who is to sentence Ghailani Tuesday, wrote in his rejection of Ghailani’s defence motion seeking to toss out the verdict that evidence of the attacks on the US embassies “all support an inference of knowing and willing participation in the conspiracy”.
“The evidence of Ghailani’s culpable mental state and intent was plentiful,” said Kaplan, whose written decision was made public Friday. “Thus if there was any injustice in the jury’s verdict, the victims were the United States and those killed, injured and otherwise devastated by these barbaric acts of terror.”
The US claimed Ghailani was part of the Al Qaeda terrorist cell operating in East Africa at the time and he personally planned the bombings in Nairobi and Dar-es-Salam, including the purchase of trucks and explosives to attack the embassies.
During the trial, defence lawyers said Ghailani was innocent of the charges and he was “duped” into the plot.
Ghailani flew to Pakistan the day before the attacks, was captured in 2004 and held in CIA-run prisons until he was moved to the US Navy base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba in 2006. He was transferred to New York in 2009, but the trial in Kaplan’s court in Lower Manhattan was held only last fall.
Ghailani’s civilian trial was considered a test for US President Barack Obama’s effort to close the infamous detention centre and transfer many of detainees to civilian justice.
Obama pledged to close the facility after taking office but has encountered resistance from Congress. Congressional lawmakers have also banned military funds from being used to transfer them to prisons in the US — a move Obama has sought. Legislators have arguing bringing them to US soil poses a security risk — a notion flatly rejected by the White House.
