The Justice Department today accused a former university professor in Florida of conspiracy to murder more than 100 Israelis and Americans in overseas suicide attacks and said he has secretly been a top leader of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorist organization for years.
In a 50-count indictment unsealed in Tampa, Sami al-Arian and seven other people, including three other Muslim activists in this country and several top officials of Palestinian Islamic Jihad overseas, also were charged with crimes ranging from racketeering to money laundering.
Federal agents lead Palestinian professor Sami Al-Arian in Tampa, Florida after being arrested for his alleged ties to terrorism.
(Ken Helle - Reuters)
|
_____From Findlaw_____
•
Indictment (U.S. v. Al-Arian)
|
| |
|
Among those charged were Ramadan Abdullah Shallah, who was a close associate of al-Arian in Tampa during the 1990s and now heads Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) from Syria; and Abd Al Aziz Awda, a founder and spiritual leader of PIJ.
Federal agents have spent a decade pursuing the case of al-Arian, who has been relieved of his duties as a computer sciences professor at the University of South Florida in Tampa. His case is one of the longest-running and most controversial probes into alleged terrorist activities in this country's history.
The criminal case against al-Arian was made possible by the USA Patriot Act, an anti-terrorist law about a month after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, officials said. That law removed long-standing legal barriers to bringing information gathered in classified national security investigations into criminal courts.
The 120-page indictment relies heavily on dozens of previously unpublicized telephone calls and faxes between al-Arian and other alleged leaders and members of PIJ that had been intercepted over the years in secret investigations mandated by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court, officials said.
"The new provisions in the USA Patriot Act proved to be the critical factor in putting together this case," said Matthew Levitt, a former FBI counter-terrorism analyst and now a researcher with the private Washington Institute for Near East Policy. "The quality and quantity of the government's evidence shows that al-Arian was deeply involved in terrorist activity, and that this is not a case of the government silencing an academic it disagrees with, as he has claimed."
Emerging from a preliminary court hearing in federal court in Tampa today, al-Arian's lawyer, Nicholas Matassini, said, "He's a political prisoner right now as we speak," and added that the indictment is "a work of fiction."
Al-Arian and his many supporters in the Muslim and civil-rights communities have strenuously protested his innocence for years, saying investigators were carrying out an anti-Islamic agenda and targeting a critic of U.S. policy in Israel. He has consistently denied he had any connection to Palestinian Islamic Jihad, which has been designated a terrorist group by the U.S. government since 1995.
But the indictment said that al-Arian was one of the leading officials of PIJ since its start in the Palestinian territories in the early 1990s, and that in fact he was the secretary of its Shura Council, or top governing body.
Citing covertly intercepted phone calls and faxes, as well as documents seized from al-Arian's office and his associates' in a court-authorized search in 1995, the indictment outlines in extraordinary detail a range of his alleged activities over many years managing PIJ's worldwide finances, and relaying internal messages among and between the group's top leaders around the world.
