TRIAL TESTIMONY: ZAWAHIRI IN LODI?

By Michelle Malkin

FBI most wanted terrorist Ayman Al-Zawahiri

Interesting news out of the Lodi, Calif., terror trial via the LATimes (hat tip: Dave Logan):

In a surprising twist, the FBI informant in the terrorism case against a Lodi man and his father said in federal court Monday that he encountered Al Qaeda's No. 2 leader in the small Central Valley farm town a few years before the Sept. 11 attacks.

Defense attorneys for Hamid Hayat and his father, Umer, said outside court that the statement by the government's key witness raised serious questions about the informant's credibility. And a former president of the Lodi mosque said terrorist leader Ayman Zawahiri was never there.

Naseem Khan, a convenience store manager turned government informant, said he told the FBI in late 2001 that he spotted Zawahiri at a Lodi mosque in 1998 and 1999.

"Every time I would go to the mosque, [Zawahiri] would be coming or going," Khan said, according to the Sacramento Bee on Monday on its website. Khan, who said he lived in Lodi at the time, testified that he spoke to Zawahiri, but never had a conversation with him.

"He would quietly come to the mosque and leave," Khan said.

Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden's top strategist and personal physician, is believed to have visited the United States on at least two occasions. In 1989, he came to Brooklyn, New York, to recruit fighters for the war in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union. The FBI believes that Zawahiri returned in 1993 to raise money in Santa Clara, Calif.

In 1998, when Khan said the terrorist leader was in Lodi, Zawahiri was merging his Egyptian operation with Bin Laden's Al Qaeda. He became a wanted man in the United States and abroad. He has been accused of planning the 1998 U.S. Embassy bombings in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

Khan, a 32-year-old Pakistani native, is a paid informant recruited by the FBI in late 2001. His statements have been attacked as unreliable by lawyers for the terror trial defendants, father and son Umer and Hamid Hayat, who are charged with lying to federal investigators about the younger man's suspected attendance at an Al Qaeda terrorist training camp in Pakistan in 2003. Fox News has more details:

Al-Zawahiri is known to have traveled to the United States in the years before the terrorist attacks, as did members of the Taliban. Federal officials and news accounts say he passed through northern California on fundraising missions during the late 1980s and early 1990s, travels that included visits to mosques in the San Francisco Bay area, Stockton and Sacramento.

He may have lived in the Sacramento area for an undetermined period in or around 1995 while visiting area mosques, according to an FBI agent in Washington, D.C., who spoke Monday on condition he not be named.

After August 1998, U.S. authorities were aggressively seeking al-Zawahiri and bin Laden in connection with the U.S. Embassy bombings in Tanzania and Kenya that killed more than 200 people, including 12 Americans. Al-Zawahiri headed the Egyptian Islamic Jihad until it merged with bin Laden's Al Qaeda in 1998.

Naseem Khan, 32, was working in a convenience store in Bend, Ore., when he was recruited by the FBI.

He completed his testimony Monday against Hamid Hayat, who is charged with three counts of making false statements to the FBI about attending the camp and with providing material support to terrorists. He faces up to 39 years in prison if convicted on all counts.

Umer Hayat, 48, faces 16 years in prison if convicted of two counts of making false statements to FBI agents.

The Hayats are being tried before separate juries that are scheduled to be brought together for the first time Tuesday in U.S. District Court.

Reader Rich H. e-mails: "If this is true, add one more to the stack of intelligence failures during the Clinton years leading up to 9/11."

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Previous:

Jihadi arrests in Lodi
Jihad in Lodi: charges filed

Joel Mowbray: Media ignores homegrown Islamic terror trial

Flashback October 2001 San Francisco Chronicle:

Two confessed members of a Silicon Valley terrorist cell say they brought Osama bin Laden's top aide to the Bay Area several years ago to raise money for terror attacks, according to documents and interviews.

Ayman al-Zawahiri, who is bin Laden's chief deputy and a suspect in a long list of terrorist crimes that includes planning last month's attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, visited the United States in the 1990s on covert fund-raising trips, the two men have told authorities.

Traveling with a stolen passport supplied by the local terrorists and using a fake name, al-Zawahiri, who has called on Muslims to kill "Americans wherever they are," visited mosques in Santa Clara, Stockton and Sacramento as part of a coast-to-coast fund-raising mission, according to these accounts.

Al-Zawahiri may have raised as much as $500,000 in America, according to a Silicon Valley acquaintance of one of the terrorists. Most of it was donated by U.S. Muslims who were told the money would aid refugees of the Afghan- Soviet war of the 1980s, said this man, who asked not to be identified because of personal safety concerns.

Instead, according to the confessed terrorists, the money went to Egyptian Islamic Jihad, implicated in dozens of terrorist attacks, from the 1981 assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat to the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Al-Zawahiri is a Jihad leader who brought the group's most violent elements into bin Laden's al Qaeda organization...

..."The very fact that someone like Zawahiri came to the U.S., that in itself should be quite stunning to many Americans," said Khalid Duran of Washington, D.C., a terrorism expert and author who has written about the Santa Clara cell.

More from Debbie Schlussel here and here.