New York Prosecutors in New York are urging a court to proceed with the scheduled trial of three men charged with involvement in the 1988 bombings of US US embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam. This comes nearly 16 years after the deadly attacks happened. Federal Judge Lewis Kaplan is expected to rule on July 23, 2014 on a request by one of the defendants, Nazih Abdul-Hamed al-Ruqai (also known as Anas al-Libi), to separate his case from those of the two other alleged bombing plotters. An attorney for Mr al-Libi said in a letter to Judge Kaplan on Thursday that his client was “terminally ill.” The 50-year-old Libyan national, who was seized last year by US commandos near the capital city of Tripoli, may have liver cancer, the Washington Post reported on Friday. BIN LADEN ASSOCIATES Mr al-Libi is currently scheduled to go on trial in November along with two alleged associates of Osama bin Laden who were arrested in London soon after the embassy attacks. Both those men — Khalid al-Fawwaz, a Saudi; and Adel Abdel Bary, an Egyptian — had been detained in the UK until their extradition to the US in 2012. Mr al-Fawwaz, 51, and Mr Bary, 54, are charged with acting as publicists for Osama bin Laden and are said to have communicated with Al-Qaeda operatives who were planning the embassy bombings. Mr al-Libi is accused of conducting surveillance of the US embassy in Nairobi in the early 1990s. His photos and diagrams were subsequently sent to the Al-Qaeda leader for review. “Bin Laden looked at the picture of the American embassy and pointed to where a truck used by a suicide bomber could go,” another member of the surveillance team, Ali Mohamed, testified in a US court in 2000. SOURCE OF PAYMENTS Judge Kaplan is also expected to, on July 23, question Mr al-Libis American attorney about the source of the payments he is receiving for his work on the case. The Washington Post and New York Times have both reported that the Libyan government is paying the attorney, Bernard Kleinman, for representing Mr al-Libi. In a recent letter to Judge Kaplan, US prosecutors urged that Mr Kleinman be asked who was paying him to represent the defendant and what, if any, instructions or advice he had received. The prosecutors letter added that accepting payments from someone other than a defendant “may subject an attorney to undesirable outside influence,” and raise an ethical question as to whether the attorney’s loyalties were with the client or the payer. Mr Kleinman cautioned in response that his removal from the case would cause a delay of many months in the start of Mr al-Libi’s trial. Only a few of the more than 20 individuals accused in the embassy bombing case remain alive and are in hiding. The most prominent of these fugitives is Ayman al-Zawahiri, who became al-Qaedas leader after bin Laden was killed in a US Special Forces raid in Pakistan in 2011. Five men convicted of involvement in the attacks are serving life sentences without parole in US prisons. A total of 224 people were killed in the nearly simultaneous blasts in the Kenyan and Tanzanian capitals on August 7, 1998. The dead included 200 Kenyans, 12 Americans, 10 Tanzanians and two suicide bombers.
Posted on: Sat, 19 Jul 2014 18:51:25 +0000
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