New York, USA - A three-year case that saw the government's star witness set himself on fire outside the White House ended with the convictions of a Yemeni sheik and his assistant on terror-funding charges.
After the verdict was announced Thursday, Sheik Mohammed Ali Hassan al-Moayad and his assistant, Mohammed Yahya Zayed, cried out in Arabic that they had been wrongly convicted because jurors had not seen all of the government's surveillance tapes. U.S. marshals rushed the men from court.
Al-Moayad and Zayed were convicted of all but two of the 10 charges in an indictment that accused them of vital roles in a terror funding network that stretched from Brooklyn to Yemen.
However, the sheik was acquitted of the charge that grabbed headlines when he was arrested two years ago in Germany: supporting al-Qaida.
Prosecutors said al-Moayad could face 75 years behind bars and Zayed could face 45 years for conspiring to support Hamas and al-Qaida and related charges. Defense attorneys said they planned to appeal.
During the outburst, al-Moayad cried out in English to reporters in the courtroom — "I want to speak with you" — then shouted in Arabic that jurors saw only "one-half of one-quarter" of the surveillance tapes that comprised the bulk of the government's case.
Al-Moayad and Zayed were recorded promising to funnel more than $2 million to Hamas in a meeting with two FBI informants in a German hotel room.
Zayed said in Arabic to U.S. District Judge Sterling Johnson Jr. after the verdict was read that he wanted another lawyer "because the jury did not fully study my case."
The convictions of Al-Moayad and Zayed, who were arrested by German police in January 2003 and extradited to the United States, "mark another important step" in the war on terrorism, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said Thursday.
Five of the unidentified jurors in the case told reporters after the verdict they had been convinced almost entirely by Al-Moayad and Zayed's words and actions on four days of secretly recorded conversations in the Frankfurt hotel.
They said they were unpersuaded, and occasionally offended, by defense suggestions the recordings were a government "reality show" that attempted to play on their anti-Muslim prejudices.
"This is a case that was designed and carried out in a way that played upon the worst possible fears of the American public," Al-Moayad's lawyer William Goodman insisted after the verdict.
But jurors said they were convinced by the defendants' behavior and their familiarity on the recordings with the names of high-ranking members of Hamas.
Jurors said Mohamed Alanssi, the key government informant who set himself on fire outside the White House and then testified as a hostile defense witness, made little difference to their deliberations. Alanssi later explained the action as an attempt to gain more money and attention from the FBI.
The case caused outrage in Yemen, where al-Moayad is a well-known cleric and high-ranking member of the Islamist opposition Islah party.
Alanssi made well-publicized claims that al-Moayad had boasted of delivering $20 million to Osama bin Laden, who called the cleric "my sheik." But jurors described much of the evidence linking al-Moayad to al-Qaida before the German sting operation as inconclusive and relatively unimportant.