Page 140 - Encyclopedia Of Terrorism

E-Kushner.qxd 26-10-02 10:40 AM Page 114

114———East African Embassy Bombings

The embassy attacks came on the eighth anniversary trained by Al Qaeda helped shoot down U.S. Army
of U.S. president George H. W. Bush’s announcement Black Hawk helicopters and kill 18 American service-
of the deployment of American troops to defend Saudi men in an October 1993 battle in the capital of
Arabia, just five days after Iraqi president Saddam Mogadishu.
Hussein’s Army had invaded neighboring Kuwait in El-Hage was acquainted with bin Laden from a
August 1990. Peshawar, Pakistan, refugee hospital during the anti-
Within a week of the attacks, the FBI, working Soviet jihad in Afghanistan and later served as bin
with Kenyan police, had arrested two suspected Laden’s personal aide when Al Qaeda was based in
Nairobi embassy bombers, both with bin Laden con- Sudan in the early 1990s. El-Hage admitted conduct-
nections. Only two months earlier, the U.S. attorney ing business transactions for bin Laden even after
for the southern district of New York, Mary Jo White, moving with his family to Kenya, where prosecutors
had obtained a sealed terrorism conspiracy indictment said he became a facilitator of the East African cell
against bin Laden, who had plainly declared war on and may have financed it with his own business
the United States in a pair of fatwas, or religious ventures, such as trading in tanzanite and diamonds.
decrees, that asked followers to target American Investigators wiretapped el-Hage’s Kenya home,
military personnel and civilians. recoding dozens of phone calls among Al Qaeda con-
The four men prosecuted included the pair of spirators, including some received from a bin Laden-
Kenya embassy bombers quickly arrested in August owned satellite phone. El-Hage left Kenya after
1998—Mohamed Rashed al-’Owhali, a Saudi, and investigators raided his home.
Mohamed Sadeek Odeh, a Jordanian of Palestinian
heritage—plus one Tanzania embassy bomber, THE TRIAL
Khalfan Khamis Mohamed, from Tanzania, arrested
10 months later in Cape Town, South Africa. When The trial began with jury selection in January 2001.
the bombings occurred, the last defendant, Lebanese- A multiracial jury of seven women and five men
born Wadih el-Hage, was living in the United States, decided the case. The government called more than
where he was a naturalized citizen. El-Hage had the 90 witnesses and presented around 1,200 exhibits—
longest association with bin Laden and had come photos, documents, bombing debris—in a two-month
under surveillance overseas. But nearly a year before presentation. The defense case lasted only two weeks;
the bombings, el-Hage repeatedly lied before the New none of the defendants testified.
York grand jury investigating Al Qaeda and protected One of the prosecution’s burdens was to place the
the conspiracy. embassy bombings in context of recent history and
All four defendants were shown to have ties to Islamic extremism. Prosecutors defined the alleged Al
bin Laden. Al-’Owhali and K. K. Mohamed trained in Qaeda terror conspiracy as a decade-long plot that
his military camps inside Afghanistan in the 1990s, evolved out of Afghanistan’s war with the former
learning how to use guns and explosives and absorb- Soviet Union, whose military first occupied the coun-
ing bin Laden’s brand of extreme Islamic ideology. try in 1979. Bin Laden and some of his followers had
Al-’Owhali fought alongside the Taliban and asked been among thousands of Arabs who had ventured to
for a mission in a personal audience with bin Laden, Afghanistan to purge the Muslim nation of communist
but K. K. Mohamed never met the leader or heard rule. These mujahideen, or holy warriors, were once
him speak. considered “freedom fighters” in a Cold War battle
Odeh, an admitted Al Qaeda soldier, engaged in supported by covert American aid, CIA trainers, and
operations for Al Qaeda as early as 1993 in Somalia, shipments of arms such as antiaircraft Stinger mis-
where bin Laden opposed the U.S. troop presence siles. Additionally, bin Laden had donated resources
bolstering the U.N. mission to restore order to the from his family’s multi-billion-dollar construction
civil war-torn nation. Odeh told the FBI that Al Qaeda business to build roads and defensive tunnels and to
aspired to “kick out the United States by military finance refugee aid. After the Soviet withdrawal in
force,” because it considered the presence “coloniza- 1989, the mujahideen stayed in touch through Maktab
tion” of the predominantly Muslim nation of 8 mil- al-Khidamat (the Services Office), based in the border
lion. Odeh said he trained Somali tribes to defend city of Peshawar, Pakistan, and contemplated the next
themselves. The government charged that Somalis jihad. This was the genesis of Al Qaeda.