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Y2K bomb plotter still talking; sentence delayed

Ressam testifies last July against Haourari, the man who provided his false driver' license and cash.

NEW YORK (CNN) -- The sentencing of convicted so-called millennium bomb plotter Ahmed Ressam has been postponed again, this time nearly for a year, until March 13, 2003.

Ressam's sentencing originally was scheduled for last September 20, and most recently for last Friday, March 29.

But the government requested continuances, citing Ressam's continued cooperation with the government on terrorism cases, according to Ressam's attorney, Tom Hillier, a federal public defender in Seattle.

U.S. District Judge John Coughenour granted the request.

After his conviction last April in a month-long federal jury trial in Los Angeles, California, Ressam agreed to cooperate with U.S. prosecutors and investigators.

He had faced a maximum sentence of 130 years for transporting explosives and other charges, but under the agreement that could be cut to 27 years.

Ressam, 35, an Algerian who trained at al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan in 1998, has offered the government and the public a rare insider's view of the now-destroyed camps where Islamic militants were given weapons and explosives training and learned the extremist ideology of the camps' financier, Saudi exile Osama bin Laden.

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Ressam is believed to be a first-hand source on alleged al Qaeda operatives such as Zacarias Moussaoui, charged with terrorism conspiracy for the September 11 attacks, and the man known as Abu Zubaydah, the alleged al Qaeda operations chief who oversaw the camps.

Ressam, who did not take the stand at his own trial, testified last July in New York at the trial of Mokhtar Haourari, 32, a Montreal shopkeeper charged with providing material support to Ressam in 1999.

Ressam told the court his plan was to detonate a suitcase bomb at Los Angeles International Airport. The plot unraveled when U.S. Customs agents stopped him on December 14, 1999, as he came across the U.S.-Canadian border into Washington state with a trunk filled with explosives and timing devices.

After Ressam's arrest, Seattle canceled its New Year's celebration centered around the Space Needle.

At the camps, Ressam said, recruits learned how to fire machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades, how to make explosives from TNT and C-4, how to poison people with cyanide, how to assassinate people, and how to sabotage urban infrastructure.

Ressam said militants came from countries as varied as Algeria, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Germany, France, Turkey and Chechnya, and that they were grouped by nationality. Weapons, he said, were sold to al Qaeda by the Taliban.

Ressam left with $12,000 seed money "to carry out an operation in America," he said. Other cells planned attacks during the turn of the millennium period in Europe, the Persian Gulf, and Israel, Ressam testified. Counterterrorism investigators thwarted a related plot to bomb a hotel frequented by Westerners in Amman, Jordan.

A jury found Haourari guilty of supporting the plot by providing Ressam cash and a fake driver's license. He was also convicted of bank and credit card fraud unrelated to the bomb plot.

The jury acquitted him of aiding and abetting a terrorist act, finding that he did not know Ressam's plan.

In January, U.S. District Judge John Keenan sentenced Haourari to 24 years in prison "because the defendant's conduct here created a grave risk to the well-being and safety of the American people."

Immediately after the Haourari trial, British police arrested another man, Haydar Abu Doha, on a U.S. warrant charging him with conspiracy for backing the foiled millennium plot at the Los Angeles airport.

Ressam had named Abu Doha as a gatekeeper who facilitated the travel of recruits to the camps and then on to countries where their operations were to occur.

Upon his arrest, Ressam had a business card with Abu Doha's phone number in London and calling cards that showed he had called the number only days before his arrest.

Doha, still incarcerated in England, is fighting extradition to the United States.