Man who bombed two US embassies in Africa gets life term

NEW YORK - Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, the first former detainee at Guantnamo Bay, Cuba, to be tried in the civilian court system, has been sentenced to life in prison for his role in the 1998 bombings of two United States Embassies in east Africa.

The nearly simultaneous attacks in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, had killed 224 people, wounding thousands.

The defence had asked the judge for a lesser sentence, citing the extraordinary circumstances of Ghailanis case, like the years he spent in detention in a so-called black site run by the CIA, where his lawyers say he was tortured, reported The New York Times.

The judge, Lewis A. Kaplan of Federal District Court in Manhattan, Tuesday said no matter how Ghailani was treated while in detention, the impact on him pales in comparison to the suffering and the horror that he and his confederates caused.

It was a cold-blooded killing and maiming of innocent people on an enormous scale, Judge Kaplan said, adding: The very purpose of the crime was to create terror by causing death and destruction.

Ghailanis case had always conveyed layers of added significance. From a policy standpoint, the trial was seen as a test of President Obamas intention of trying military detainees in civilian court whenever feasible.

From a terrorism perspective, Ghailani was viewed as a bridge between two distinct eras: before and after 9/11, when Al Qaeda emerged even more prominently.

In the six years that the government says Ghailani was a fugitive after the attacks, he trained in Qaeda camps in Afghanistan and became a bodyguard for bin Laden - aspects of his life that the jury was never told.

Ghailani, originally from Tanzania and captured in Pakistan in 2004 after a 14-hour gun battle with Pakistani authorities.

But Tuesday, Judge Kaplan made it clear that Ghailanis treatment while in detention, or statements he had made before he was brought into the civilian system, were not factors in his deciding on a sentence.

This trial has been as divorced from any questionable practice that may have been engaged in by anybody other than the defendant as this human being is capable of having made it, the judge said. I simply put all of that out of my mind.

Although Ghailani was acquitted of over 280 charges of murder and conspiracy, the judge focused on the solitary conviction of conspiracy to destroy government buildings and property.

Mr. Ghailani knew and intended that people would be killed as a result of his own actions and of the conspiracy that he joined, Judge Kaplan said, adding that was supported by the trial record alone.

In the end, Ghailani received the same maximum sentence, life without parole, that he would have faced had he been convicted of all counts. And it seems likely that he will be sent to the so-called Supermax federal prison in Florence, Colorado, where other defendants convicted in the same embassy plot are being held.