Stephanie Clifford
March 4, 2015
Abid Naseer, Terror Suspect, Is Found Guilty on All Counts in 2009 Bomb Plot
Abid Naseer was convicted on Wednesday in Federal District Court in Brooklyn of supporting terrorism and conspiracy to set off a destructive device in a plot by Al Qaeda.
Mr. Naseer’s conviction for his participation in a plan to bomb a shopping center in Manchester, England, adds to a changing understanding of terrorists. Like Mohammed Emwazi, the Islamic State executioner known in the news media as “Jihadi John,” Mr. Naseer was a middle-class student in Britain as he involved himself in an extremist group.
Well educated and charismatic, from a family he described as “wealthy,” Mr. Naseer, 28, declined to have his case argued by a court-appointed lawyer, instead representing himself during the two-week trial in Brooklyn. He told the jury, “I wanted the people to hear my voice and hear my story.”
The government argued that he had helped organize a plot to bomb the shopping center in 2009. Prosecutors said he had updated his Qaeda handler via email, using code words like “marriage” for the bombing plot, and women’s names for specific types of bombs.
Mr. Naseer said he did not know the person he was corresponding with was a Qaeda member. He was simply updating an Internet friend on his love life, he said.
Still, the email address Mr. Naseer was sending messages to was the same address that another man who testified, Najibullah Zazi, was writing to. Mr. Zazi, who pleaded guilty to participating in a Qaeda plot to bomb the New York City subway system, said that the email address was that of his handler and that he was told to use the code word “marriage” when talking about the plot. That was a difficult fact for Mr. Naseer to overcome.
Some claims during his own testimony were hard to believe as well, including one that he had no opinions about Al Qaeda despite growing up in Pakistan as the group gained prominence.
Other arguments from both sides had holes. For instance, in the final email Mr. Naseer sent to the purported Qaeda handler before his arrest in England in April 2009, he said that his marriage was set for a range of dates in April and he expected a lot of guests. By that point, prosecutors showed, Mr. Naseer had broken up with his girlfriend and was not speaking to her, making it a stretch that he was planning a real wedding.
The government’s side, too, had weaknesses. British MI5 officers who had tracked Mr. Naseer for several weeks in March and April were supposed to give key evidence against Mr. Naseer. Instead, they talked of watching him go grocery shopping and taking the bus around Manchester.
Representing himself, Mr. Naseer won a point or two against the seasoned prosecutors trying his case. He was calm as he asked questions of witnesses, and, during two days of testifying in his own defense, remained logical and focused. Lacking the legal training or rhetorical flourishes of a trained lawyer, though, he missed chance after chance to underline problems with witnesses or evidence and to emphasize those problems to the jury. Still, given that he was preparing for court in a jail cell, he did not do badly.
British authorities released Mr. Naseer and his alleged co-conspirators after his 2009 arrest because of a lack of evidence. He was indicted in the United States in 2010 under a law that lets the federal government pursue terrorism cases even when they occur outside of the country, and extradited here in 2013.
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