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al-'Owhali

NEW YORK -- Convicted embassy bomber Mohamed al-'Owhali will begin his case to spare his life Monday with few witnesses willing to testify on his behalf. Not even his own family will appear before the jury.

Al-'Owhali, guilty of participating in the 1998 bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi, Kenya, and murdering the 213 people who died in the blast, is undergoing a second trial phase to determine his sentence.

The options for the jury -- the same panel that convicted him -- are either the death penalty, which requires a unanimous vote, or life in prison without the possibility of parole.

Government prosecutors spent two days presenting relatives of those who died in the bombing and people who were seriously injured by the blast. They testified about the attack's impact, a factor in determining sentence.

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Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald told the court he plans to argue that evidence of the future danger al-'Owhali could pose is shown in a photograph taken in a Kenyan jail shortly after his arrest. Al-'Owhali is smiling, his fists clenched like a boxer. "Posed like he was some sort of champion. An utter and total lack of remorse," Fitzgerald said in his opening statement..

The defense presentation will begin at 10 a.m. ET Monday in U.S. District Court in Manhattan.

David Baugh, an attorney for al-'Owhali, told the jury in his opening statement that he will present evidence of the political circumstances and propaganda that influenced his client's thinking, such as U.S. military conduct in Iraq and Panama.

One influence was fellow Saudi Osama bin Laden, the leader of the Islamic militant group "al Qaeda" and the alleged instigator of a worldwide conspiracy to kill Americans that included the August 7, 1998, bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.

Al-'Owhali, 24, trained in bin Laden's military camps inside Afghanistan, was exposed first-hand to his statements advocating "jihad," or holy war, against the U.S.

Baugh told Judge Leonard Sand that he's had a hard time getting expert witnesses to testify.

"This trial is -- people are afraid of it. I will tell you right now, people who are trying to get the sanctions lifted in Iraq don't like the fact that they get called terrorists, and they don't want to have anything to do with the terrorists," Baugh said.

Fred Cohn, al-'Owhali's other attorney, told Sand that no one from al-'Owhali's family would appear. Cohn said that although al-'Owhali occasionally speaks to his family from a jail phone, his father told Cohn, "It was not to their advantage to come."

Baugh is seeking to make a case about comparative guilt -- that al-'Owhali believed the United States, in effect, engaged in "genocide and terrorism" in repeated air strikes against Iraq and in supporting U.N. economic sanctions since the end of the Persian Gulf War.

Baugh mentioned studies that concluded more than a million Iraqis, mostly children, have died because of diminished food imports and the destruction of infrastructure such as water purification plants.

"Since this trial started with jury selection, since January 3, children have been dying in Iraq at the rate of about 6,000 monthly. It works out to about 250 a day, and that is according to the U.N. He [al-'Owhali] does know that," Baugh said.

The World Health Organization has reported a majority of Iraqis have lived on a "semi-starvation diet for years" while the country's infant mortality more than doubled in the past decade.

"If you are going to fight the Iraqi war before this jury, I am not going to stop you," Sand said, but he forbade showing the jury gory pictures of Iraqi children.

Baugh hopes to play half a dozen videotapes for the jury, including a 1996 "60 Minutes" segment with former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright discussing U.S. policy against Iraq, and the documentary "Panama Deception," a 1993 Oscar-winning film about the 1989 invasion to arrest Manuel Noriega, in which, he said, many more civilians died than official U.S. accounts admit.

The court will decide early Monday morning which video evidence is admissible.