Free Republic

Two men being held in jail while awaiting trial for cigarette trafficking are accused of plotting to kill witnesses against them. In an indictment unsealed in Brooklyn Supreme Court Thursday, Basel Ramadan and Yousseff Odeh are charged with conspiracy to murder witnesses and with soliciting a potential hit man. The murder-for-hire plot was hatched from New York City's Rikers Island jail where the two have been held since their May arrest on the initial cigarette-trafficking and money laundering charges. The Staten Island Advance reports that Odeh was a supporter of blind sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, the spiritual guide for the...

American jurisprudence and homeland security aligned yesterday, as a jury of her peers found terrorist lawyer-cum-facilitator Lynne Stewart guilty of aiding international Islamist murderers. After 13 days of deliberation, the federal jury found Stewart and her two co-defendants guilty on all counts, including providing material support to terrorism, conspiracy, and defrauding the government. The saga began in 1995, when Stewart defended and befriended “the Blind Sheikh” Omar Abdel Rahman, the mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. In the ensuring years, Stewart – with the aid of co-defendants Ahmed Abdel Sattar and Mohamed Yousry – illegally passed on fatwas...

For the last three months, the defendant who has drawn the most attention in a terror trial under way in Manhattan federal court is Lynne F. Stewart, who made a name as a defense lawyer for suspects accused of terrorism. But as the prosecutors' case has unfolded, most of the evidence about the international conspiracy they hope to prove has centered on a defendant who sits silently beside her, Ahmed Abdel Sattar. A Staten Island postal worker and a Muslim, Mr. Sattar served as a paralegal aide for Ms. Stewart in the 1995 trial of Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, the...

NEW YORK -- Authorities believe a U.S. postal employee in custody here helped draft a letter of introduction that may have been used by two men who posed as journalists to assassinate a leading opposition figure in Afghanistan last fall, according to a U.S. official familiar with the case.Click here for full Washington Post article