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New defendant added to bin Laden conspiracy case

From Phil Hirschkorn
CNN New York bureau

NEW YORK (CNN) -- A new defendant has been added to the federal government's terrorist conspiracy case against Saudi exile Osama bin Laden and his alleged associates.

Court documents obtained show that the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York is preparing to prosecute a man who has been held secretly in a Manhattan jail since November.

The defendant, Mohamed Suleiman al Nalfi, is charged with four counts of conspiracy: to kill Americans; to murder, kidnap, and maim Americans outside the United States; to destroy U.S. buildings and property; and to attack U.S. defense utilities.

These are four of the same broad conspiracy counts levied against bin Laden and 20 other men, including the four on trial since January in Manhattan's federal courthouse.

CASE FILE Shattered Diplomacy: The U.S. Embassy Bombings Trial An in-depth special report on the trial of four men charged with the embassy bombings Trial reports | Timeline | Key Figures   GALLERY Images from the U.S. embassy bombing in Tanzania  TRANSCRIPT Testimony of FBI agent Abigail Perkins - March 19, 2001 (PDF) Documents in PDF format require Adobe Acrobat Reader for viewing.

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The terror conspiracy case includes, but is not limited to, the dual bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in August 1998. The dual bombings killed 224 people, including 12 Americans, in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Al Nalfi is not accused of involvement in those bombings.

Al Nalfi is accused of establishing around 1989 a group devoted to "jihad," or Muslim "holy war," in his native Sudan and of recruiting Sudanese nationals to the cause.

The indictment accuses al Nalfi of helping bin Laden relocate his base of operations to Sudan around 1991 and of establishing one of bin Laden's companies, Taba Investments, in the Sudanese capital of Khartoum.

Al Nalfi is also accused of preparing members of his jihad group to travel to Somalia, where prosecutors have said tribes trained by bin Laden's forces attacked American soldiers assisting a United Nations peacekeeping effort there in 1993.

Eighteen U.S. Army Rangers died in a firefight on October 3,1993, in the Somali capital of Mogadishu.

Al Nalfi, who is to be tried at a later date, was arraigned last Friday in an unpublicized hearing before U.S District Judge Leonard B. Sand, who has presided over the embassy bombing case since the fall of 1998.

He pleaded not guilty.

His attorney, Marion Seltzer, told the court that al Nalfi knows no Americans, that he has never before been to the United States, and that he was "basically kidnapped by the FBI in Nigeria and brought here," according to a transcript of the arraignment.

Seltzer complained that al Nalfi, incarcerated under the same strict conditions as are the embassy bombings trial defendants, is "being housed like an animal."

Seltzer could not immediately be reached for additional comment.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Michael Garcia told the court the government would be prepared to go forward with a trial of al Nalfi alone or with other defendants in custody awaiting trial.

Four other defendants named in the expanded indictment are in either U.S. or British custody. The three in Britain are still fighting extradition.

Al Nalfi is not entirely new to the embassy bombings case. His name was mentioned during the trial's first days of testimony. Witness Jamal Al-Fadl, a government informant who was an early member of bin Laden organization, al Qaeda, named al Nalfi as belonging to the group.

Al Nalfi once helped smuggle Kalashnikov assault rifles to Egypt on a herd of 50 camels in Khartoum, according to Al-Fadl. Al-Fadl, who defected from al Qaeda in 1996, said that al Nalfi was married to his niece.

The embassy bombings trial was in its seventh week of testimony on Thursday.

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Agent: Defendant said Kenya embassy 'easy target'
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Agent: Defendant called Kenya attack a 'blunder'
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U.S. State Department
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Patterns of Global Terrorism: 1999
FBI Websites Document Evidence Against Bin Laden
Ussamah Bin Laden
US District Court, Southern District of New York
Terrorism Research Center
Africa News on the World Wide Web

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