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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...

FBI affidavit details Abdel-Rahman's jailhouse pipeline JUNE 3--Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman laughed at the ease with which his legal team improperly smuggled messages that allowed the Muslim extremist to continue directing terrorist operations while serving a life sentence in a Minnesota prison cell, according to a sealed FBI affidavit obtained by The Smoking Gun. Abdel-Rahman joked that "trained doves" were transporting messages to his disciples. "I really would like that they arrest those doves. I wish that one day I read, 'The FBI was able to arrest the doves that are contacting the Sheikh.'" The convicted terrorist then added, "as...

The Perfect Storm author spent a month with anti-Taliban warrior Ahmad Shah Massoud in 2000. Now he offers his reaction to the recent murder of the Northern Alliance leader—and the subsequent attacks on the U.S. In November 2000 [National Geographic] Adventure sent contributing editor Sebastian Junger and photojournalist Reza (see photo gallery) to profile Afghan resistance leader Ahmad Shah Massoud. The resulting article (read an excerpt) appeared in our March/April 2001 issue and has just been reprinted in Fire, a collection of Junger’s journalistic work. ________________________________________________________ On September 9, 2001, suicide bombers killed Massoud. Two days later the U.S. was...

WASHINGTON, Sept. 16, 2007 – Coalition forces yesterday captured a man suspected of being behind the Sept. 13 assassination of Sheik Abdul-Sattar Abu Risha, an influential Sunni leader who helped fight Al Qaeda in Iraq’s Anbar Forces, officials in Baghdad announced during a briefing today. “Investigative and intelligence reports indicate Fallah Khalifa Hiyas Fayyas al-Jumayli, also known as Abu Khamis, was involved the planning and execution of the plot to kill the sheik and was also plotting to kill other leaders of the Anbar Awakening Council as well,” said Navy Rear Adm. Mark I. Fox, Multi-National Force Iraq spokesman. Intelligence...

NEW YORK -- Civil rights lawyer Lynne Stewart was sentenced to 28 months in prison in federal court in Manhattan Monday. She was convicted of providing support to terrorists by helping a jailed Egyptian sheik communicate with his followers on the outside. Before sentencing, her lawyer told the judge that any prison sentence for Stewart would be a death sentence because of her serious health problems. Stewart pleaded with the judge to allow her to live out the rest of her life "productively, lovingly, righteously.'' Assistant US Attorney Andrew Dember rejected defense suggestions that Stewart's conduct was judged differently after9-11. "This case...

The ruins of the World Trade Center were still burning when federal agents arrested two men at Kennedy Airport who were found with more than $140,000 hidden in cardboard boxes with honey jars bound for Yemen. For the agents, aware that terrorists were said to use honey shipments to hide money, that slender lead could not be ignored. If the world was suddenly different for everybody back then, in October 2001, with federal agents and prosecutors both properly alarmed and also under sudden pressure to make terrorism cases, they still relied on old techniques developed in generations of Mafia and...

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...

NEW YORK -- More than half a year after beginning its work, a federal jury on Wednesday started deliberating the fate of a Manhattan lawyer accused of assisting terrorists and lying to the government. After about two hours, it went home without a verdict. Attorney Lynne Stewart, 65, was charged with conspiring to provide material support to terrorists, defrauding the government and lying to the government as she represented Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman, who is serving a life prison sentence. Prosecutors say Stewart conspired with Arabic interpreter Mohamed Yousry and postal employee Ahmed Abdel Sattar to spread Abdel-Rahman's deadly messages to...

NEW YORK (AP) - A lawyer and two co-defendants helped an imprisoned Egyptian sheik commit a sort of "jailbreak" by allowing him to get around prison rules and feed messages to terrorists overseas, a prosecutor told a federal jury Wednesday. In his closing argument, assistant U.S. attorney Andrew Dember asked the jury to convict the three of a conspiracy to overcome the government's effort to silence the still "powerful and influential" prisoner, Omar Abdel-Rahman. Civil rights lawyer Lynne Stewart and her co-defendants, Ahmed Abdel Sattar and Mohamed Yousry, testified they obeyed the law in the work they did for Abdel-Rahman....

NEW YORK (AP) - An FBI informant who set himself on fire in front of the White House played a role in at least three terror investigations, court documents show. Defense attorneys said Wednesday they are re-examining Mohamed Alanssi's role in the cases against their clients, who are accused of helping fund Osama bin Laden, al-Qaida and the Palestinian group Hamas. "Ultimately what I'm heading for is a motion for dismissal," said Frank Hancock, the lawyer for Abad Elfgeeh, a Yemeni-born man accused of illegally sending millions of dollars overseas. A spokesman for U.S. Attorney Roslynn Mauskopf, who filed the...

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

Cheerleaders for TerrorismBy Erick StakelbeckFrontPageMagazine.com | June 17, 2003 Two groups whom Islamic terrorists can count on for sympathy and support are radical lawyers and their counterparts in American law schools. Lynne Stewart is a hero of the National Lawyers Guild and a sought-after campus lecturer. While out on bail under indictment for colluding with a terrorist leader, she has been a sought-after speaker for law school audiences who relish her attacks on Attorney General John Ashcroft as a modern-day fascist and on her country for its imperialist and racist policies. Stewart made national headlines in April 2002 when she...

Staten Island Democratic Association's meeting this week featured "guest of honor" criminal defense lawyer Lynne Stewart, a former Islander who is facing charges of terrorism. Ms. Stewart keynote address updated the group on the government's case against her. Ms. Stewart, a former Stapleton resident who graduated from Wagner College, was arrested in 2002 for allegedly providing material support for terrorism, among other charges. New charges have just been filed against Ms. Stewart charging her with conspiracy to commit terrorism by using convicted World Trade Center bomber Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman as "personnel" to carry out her acts. Additionally, she is...

Terrorist LawyerBy George PackerThe New York Times | September 23, 2002 One Saturday morning in November 1994, Ramsey Clark, attorney general under President Johnson and more recently a spokesman for radical Arab causes, met in his Manhattan office with a criminal defense lawyer named Lynne Stewart. Clark wanted Stewart to take on a new client -- Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, a blind Egyptian cleric and the spiritual leader of the worldwide jihad movement, whose most recent address before the Metropolitan Correctional Center was a fourth-floor apartment in Jersey City. The sheik was about to go on trial for directing a...

NEW YORK, Oct 04, 2002 (AP WorldStream via COMTEX) -- A Manhattan attorney accused of helping a jailed Egyptian cleric direct terrorism will not go on trial until late next year, a judge ruled. U.S. District Judge John Koeltl on Thursday set a trial date of Oct. 7, 2003, for Lynne Stewart and co-defendants Mohammed Yousry, an Arabic translator, and Ahmed Abdel Sattar, a U.S. postal worker. The judge considered setting a Sept. 16, 2003, trial date until Stewart's lawyer objected, arguing it fell too near the anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. "The risk to a fair trial...

A Staten Island mailman who was a follower of the blind terror sheik tracked down confidential addresses of FBI agents and prosecutors pursuing Al Qaeda, according to court records and federal sources. Ahmed Sattar, described by federal prosecutors as a point man for a major terror group in America, was spotted by one federal agent near his home. The agent moved his family from the area.Sattar also was put on the federal payroll, receiving thousands of dollars to be a paralegal for Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman during his 1995 terror trial, government officials said.Even though federal investigators became suspicious of...