Sep 19, 2007 4:21 pm US/Central
Muslim Charity's Terror-Funding Trial Goes To Jury
DALLAS (AP) ―
After two months of testimony and three days of lawyers' closing arguments, a jury prepared Wednesday to begin deliberating whether leaders of a Muslim charity spent years helping needy people or secretly financed Middle East terrorism.
Prosecutors said the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development used charity as a cover to funnel millions in illegal aid to groups controlled by the Palestinian militant group Hamas.
Holy Land and five of its former leaders are not accused of violence. Rather, prosecutors have pieced together documents and videotapes that they say show a careful and secretive plan to bankroll social services that helped Hamas gain support from Palestinian civilians and recruit suicide bombers.
Defense attorneys say Holy Land, the largest Muslim charity in the country until federal agents shut it down in December 2001, only provided help to desperately poor children and families, many of them living in refugee camps in Gaza and the West Bank.
Lawyers for both sides finished closing arguments Wednesday, and federal District Judge A. Joe Fish was to read the charges late in the day then turn the case over to jurors.
The case may boil down to two key witnesses -- and which one jurors believe.
The prosecution's key witness was an Israeli official who said the Palestinian groups that Holy Land supported were controlled by Hamas. The U.S. government designated Hamas a terrorist organization in 1995, making it a crime to support it.
The Israeli official was allowed to testify under a pseudonym, Avi, and spectators were forced to leave the courtroom while he was on the witness stand.
Defense attorney Linda Moreno told jurors Wednesday that the government's case had no credibility -- that it relied on "Avi, whose name we don't know," and on unsigned, undated documents seized from the Virginia home of an alleged co-conspirator.
Moreno said the prosecution was politically motivated against defendants who opposed the policy of Israel, a U.S. ally, toward Palestinians.
The key defense witness was Edward Abbington, a retired U.S. diplomat who served in Jerusalem during the 1990s. Abbington said he got daily CIA briefings and yet was never told that the organizations supported by Holy Land were controlled by Hamas.
Prosecutors tried to undermine Abbington's credibility by hinting he had an anti-Israel bias and noting he became a lobbyist for the Palestinian Authority after retiring from the State Department.
In their closing arguments, prosecutors portrayed the defendants as Hamas supporters who went to great lengths to keep up the front of a benign charity.
Prosecutor Barry Jonas pointed to a Holy Land manual that instructed leaders on how to avoid detection by law enforcement. He tied the manual to a comment by Holy Land Chief Executive Shukri Abu Baker that "War is deception." The FBI secretly recorded the comment at a 1993 meeting called to discuss how to derail an Israeli-Palestinian peace accord -- a goal of Hamas.
"Is this what a real charity would do?" Jonas said.
The government shut down Texas-based Holy Land in December 2001 and seized its assets. Prosecutors say Holy Land funneled more than $12 million to groups controlled by Hamas after the U.S. government declared Hamas a terrorist group.
The five former Holy Land officials are charged with aiding a terrorist group, conspiracy and money laundering. If convicted of the most serious charges, they could be sentenced to life in prison.
Besides Baker, the other defendants are former Holy Land chairmen Mohammed El-Mezain and Ghassan Elashi, former fundraiser Mufid Abdulqader, and Abdulrahman Odeh, the group's New Jersey representative.
Elashi is already serving prison terms after being convicted in two other cases of making illegal computer shipments to countries supporting terrorism, and of having financial dealings with a designated terrorist, a Hamas leader who is married to his cousin. The other four defendants are free.
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