In U.S. Court, a Familiar Argument Over Intentions in Joining a Terrorist Group
The narrative heard in federal court in Manhattan on Wednesday was an
increasingly common one: a defendant from a faraway land claimed he was
not an anti-American terrorist but rather someone who had become
involved in his own country’s wars.
This time, the defendant was Mohamed Ibrahim Ahmed, a 38-year-old
Eritrean. His lawyers have said that his earliest memories were of
explosions and rebels, of running, hiding and being evacuated from his
home in the 1970s during the bloody Ethiopian-Eritrean conflict.
More than three decades later, Mr. Ahmed sought to join the fight
against Ethiopia by seeking military training from Al Shabab, a Somali
group with ties to Al Qaeda that the United States had designated a
foreign terrorist organization. He was arrested in Nigeria in November
2009 and brought to Manhattan in 2010 to face terrorism charges.
The case was widely watched as a potential test of the Obama administration’s strategy of interrogating terrorism suspects for both intelligence and law enforcement purposes. Mr. Ahmed pleaded guilty in June
in Federal District Court to conspiring to provide material support to
Al Shabab and to receive military-type training from it.
In court, a defense lawyer, Sabrina Shroff, told the judge that her
client held no animosity toward the United States. In court papers filed
earlier, his lawyers quoted comments by Mr. Ahmed: He “advised that he
had friends in the United States and hoped to visit the country some day
in the future. He remarked that people in the United States are ‘funny’
and ‘like life.’ ”
Ms. Shroff had asked that her client receive a five-year term, half the
maximum sentence that prosecutors were seeking. Ms. Shroff said that her
client’s support for Al Shabab had “nothing to do with the United
States.”
Mr. Ahmed, addressing the judge, acknowledged that helping Al Shabab had
been “a big mistake.” He added, “I don’t blame anyone but myself,” and
he asked for a chance to change his life.
But a prosecutor, Benjamin Naftalis, said that Mr. Ahmed’s views toward
Americans were irrelevant, adding that Mr. Ahmed had gone on a “jihad
quest, and he wasn’t going to stop until he had accomplished that.”
The government said in court papers that Mr. Ahmed had admitted, under
questioning by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, that he had received
bomb-making instructions from a Shabab explosives expert, had donated
money to the group and had bought an AK-47 assault rifle and two
grenades to be used in fighting on its behalf.
The judge, P. Kevin Castel, imposed a sentence of nine years and three
months. Mr. Ahmed will also be deported when he completes the sentence.
The judge cited Mr. Ahmed’s own statements in his guilty plea: that he
had given money to Al Shabab while knowing that the United States
considered it to be a terrorist organization.
Ms. Shroff and Mr. Naftalis debated whether a stiffer sentence for Mr.
Ahmed would serve to deter future terrorists. “There is no deterring
someone if they are a fanatic, and there is no deterring someone if they
are engaged in a fight in their own nation,” Ms. Shroff said.
Mr. Naftalis responded that there were people like Mr. Ahmed around the
world, and that they had to learn that there were “consequences to
committing those crimes, to aligning themselves with a terrorist group,
the only purpose of which is to kill innocents.”
Judge Castel made it clear that he agreed. He said a “would-be
terrorist” who might be intent on carrying out actions that would harm
himself and others would not necessarily be indifferent to serving a
long sentence in an American prison. He added: “There is little glory to
him in that sort of an outcome.”
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