An FBI informant testified Monday that a top al-Qaida official lived in California's Central Valley in the years before the 2001 terrorist attacks, but the statements were attacked immediately as unreliable.
The testimony came during an ongoing terrorism-related trial involving a father and son from Lodi, an agricultural town about 35 miles south of Sacramento.
The government informant, Naseem Khan, testified that he often saw Ayman al-Zawahri, Osama bin Laden's physician and top deputy, attending a mosque in Lodi in 1998 and 1999. Khan was living there at the time.
'Every time I would go to the mosque, (al-Zawahri) would be coming or going,' Khan testified, according to a story posted Monday on The Sacramento Bee's Web site. 'He would quietly come to the mosque and leave.'
Prosecutors offered the testimony to show why the FBI began investigating Lodi's Islamic community. The agency recruited Khan in December 2001, and he initially focused his undercover efforts on two Muslim clerics.
He soon began concentrating on 23-year-old Hamid Hayat, who sometimes worked seasonal jobs at a fruit-packing plant.
Hayat and his father, Umer, who drove an ice cream truck, have been charged with lying to federal investigators about the younger man's suspected attendance at an al-Qaida terrorist training camp in Pakistan in 2003.
Khan's testimony was discounted immediately outside court by law enforcement officials, Lodi residents and defense attorneys representing the two men on trial.
'It's outrageous,' said Wazhma Mojaddidi, Hamid Hayat's attorney. 'He (al-Zawahri) never lived in Lodi.'
Nasim Khan, no relation to the FBI informant, was the mosque's president from 1998 to 2000 and said al-Zawahri never attended. He and Mojaddidi both noted that al-Zawahri, an Egyptian, would have been noticed in the largely Pakistani community.
Al-Zawahri is known to have traveled to the United States in the years before the terrorist attacks, as did members of the Taliban. Federal officials and news accounts say he passed through northern California on fundraising missions during the late 1980s and early 1990s, travels that included visits to mosques in the San Francisco Bay area, Stockton and Sacramento.
He may have lived in the Sacramento area for an undetermined period in or around 1995 while visiting area mosques, according to an FBI agent in Washington, D.C., who spoke Monday on condition he not be named.
After August 1998, U.S. authorities were aggressively seeking al-Zawahri and bin Laden in connection with the U.S. Embassy bombings in Tanzania and Kenya that killed more than 200 people, including 12 Americans. Al-Zawahri headed the Egyptian Islamic Jihad until it merged with bin Laden's al-Qaida in 1998.
Naseem Khan, 32, was working in a convenience store in Bend, Ore., when he was recruited by the FBI.
He completed his testimony Monday against Hamid Hayat, who is charged with three counts of making false statements to the FBI about attending the camp and with providing material support to terrorists. He faces up to 39 years in prison if convicted on all counts.
Umer Hayat, 48, faces 16 years in prison if convicted of two counts of making false statements to FBI agents.
The Hayats are being tried before separate juries that are scheduled to be brought together for the first time Tuesday in U.S. District Court.
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Associated Press Writer Mark Sherman contributed to this report from Washington, D.C.
What do we expect from a smoke and mirrors politics. Bin Laden was a CIA agent before moving drastically to fight the americans. Personally, I think Bin Laden is just a creation of the Bush administration to spread fear among the american people, so he could get support for his murderous wars in Afganistan, Iraq and now Lebanon. Don't trust american media... they just want to install the fear among people so that they can rule them through increasing terror levels.
They used the same kind of witness during the trial of the 1993 WTC bombing in NY, they presented a witness Jamal Al Fadel, a sudanese citizen who depicted Bin Laden as being this almighty pupeteer presiding over a tentacular organisation : the myth of Al Qaeda was born. It turns out that Al Fadel who had indeed met Bin Laden when he was based in Sudan but he was just a crook who stole some money from him, and was on the run. The Feds paid him a few hundred thousand dollars and he's started singing whatever they wanted to hear. And some people still think 9/11 was entirely engineered by 19 arab schmucks, well if that's the case, let's rewrite history : the Reichstag fire was done by communists...
guess what? d uring the authopsies, there were no arab bodies on the planes, somehow the names of arabs (which some are still alive, by the way in other countries) sneak in the manifest of the plane, strange ain't it? No way Bin Laden could have set that up. Actually, he had denied any involvement with 9/11. But the bloodsucker... Bush insisted so much it was him, that must have been a good marketing push for him.
chargement...
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