Stephanie Clifford
March 3, 2015
Terrorism Case Against Pakistani Man Is Going to Jury
As arguments in Abid Naseer’s trial on terrorism charges came to a close on Monday, jurors had heard from British intelligence officers in disguise, an F.B.I. attaché who observed Osama bin Laden’s dead body and Mr. Naseer himselfarguing that he was an innocent man.
Mr. Naseer, 28, a Pakistani, is accused of planning to attack a Manchester, England, shopping mall in a plot by Al Qaeda that would have also included the New York City subway system and a Danish newspaper. But the alleged plot was never carried out.
The strongest link between Mr. Naseer and terrorist activity was in emails: a series of messages that he wrote to the address sana_pakhtana@yahoo.com that discussed women and marriage in often-awkward phrases. The Yahoo account was that of a Qaeda handler who also corresponded with an admitted Qaeda supporter and terrorist plotter, Najibullah Zazi. Like Mr. Naseer’s emails to sana_pakhtana, Mr. Zazi’s were full of references to his “marriage,” which Mr. Zazi testified was code for a bombing plot.
Mr. Naseer argued that his emails were innocent chatter about girls with a friend he met in an Internet chat room — who he had no idea was a Qaeda affiliate.
Now, jurors in Federal District Court in Brooklyn will decide which side to believe. Was Mr. Naseer going into Tesco stores because that is what a typical student in England would do? Or was he scouting for bomb ingredients? Was he returning home to Pakistan to see his family, or to train with Al Qaeda? Did he delete all emails from his account the day he sent his final email to the sana_pakhtana address because he needed more space, or because he was covering his tracks as the attack neared?
In the government’s closing argument, a prosecutor, Zainab Ahmad, hit on the danger of the alleged plot.
“That man wanted to drive a car bomb into a crowded shopping center and watch people die,” she said.
She spent much of her time discussing the emails. “The fact that Sohaib is emailing with the defendant shows you the defendant is Al Qaeda,” she said, using a name for the sana_pakhtana account holder.
She dismissed exchanges like “How are you?” and “What’s the weather like?” as “chitter-chatter.”
“They want to make these emails seem normal,” Ms. Ahmad said. “They want to make sure these emails don’t arouse suspicion.”
The important passages, she said, were those where Mr. Naseer went into detail about women and cars — a car bomb was one of the methods he was considering, she said.
For instance, Mr. Naseer wrote once that a woman named Huma seemed “weak and difficult to convince.” That, Ms. Ahmad argued, referred to a hydrogen peroxide bomb, which requires a long time to become concentrated enough to work, though the prosecutor did not point to evidence in the trial backing up that point.
“Think about what good code it is: two guys speaking about cars and girls,” she said.
She also highlighted apparent inconsistencies in Mr. Naseer’s argument. In Mr. Naseer’s final email to the sana_pakhtana address, days before he was arrested in England, he refers to his wedding later in the month.
Mr. Naseer had broken up with his girlfriend by that point and was not speaking to her, Ms. Ahmad said, making it hard to believe that he was planning to marry her. In the email, he also says he wishes sana_pakhtana could be at the wedding. Either “the defendant wants his random Internet friend to come to his wedding,” Ms. Ahmad said, or he is alerting his Qaeda handler that an attack is ready.
Mr. Naseer is representing himself, and much of his summation was tedious; he spent more than two hours reading transcripts aloud.
However, when he broke from that, he was engaging, making eye contact with jurors as he read from a white legal pad as he said that the government had not proved its case.
“Did anyone say anything about the defendant’s extremist views?” he said. “Did anyone give evidence to the fact that Abid Naseer and his friends were preparing explosive material?”
Did anyone say “that I’m the one who can tell you that the defendant Abid Naseer was trained by Al Qaeda?” he said. Did anyone “tell the court during this trial that Abid Naseer is connected to Al Qaeda?”
“We all know the answer. It is a two-letter word: no,” he said.
“With all the resources, with all the PowerPoint slides,” he said, “with all this showing off, no promise was fulfilled.”
He argued that he had represented himself and testified “so he can be candid and honest about everything.”
He also told jurors that he and the men arrested with him in Britain were released by the authorities there because “there was insufficient evidence to prosecute anybody by the U.K. government,” which is consistent with earlier accounts of the case.
Jurors will begin deliberating on Tuesday about whether Mr. Naseer provided support to a terrorist organization, was part of a conspiracy providing support to a terrorist organization, and conspired to use a destructive device (a bomb, in this case).
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