The defendants were acquitted of attempted murder charges but face life in prison for conspiring to kill military personnel. The federal jury spent about 38 hours deliberating over the past six days.
The men lived in and around Philadelphia for years. The government said after their 2007 arrest that an attack had been imminent and that the case underscored the dangers of terrorist plots hatched on U.S. soil.
During the eight-week trial, the government relied heavily on information gathered by the informants, who infiltrated the group and secretly recorded hundreds of conversations.
Prosecutors said the men bought several assault rifles supplied by the FBI and that they trekked to Pennsylvania's Pocono Mountains to practice their shooting. The government also presented dozens of jihadist speeches and videos that the men supposedly used as inspiration.
Convicted were: Jordanian-born cab driver Mohamad Shnewer; Turkish-born convenience store clerk Serdar Tatar; and brothers Dritan, Eljvir and Shain Duka, ethnic Albanians from the former Yugoslavia, who had a roofing business.
Prosecutors in the case at Fort Dix said the group chose the Army post because one of the defendants was familiar with it. His father's pizza shop delivered to the New Jersey base, which is 25 miles from Philadelphia and is used primarily to train reservists for duty in Iraq.
The group's objective was to kill "as many American soldiers as possible," according to prosecutors.
"I think they were in the last stage of planning," then-U.S. Attorney Christopher Christie said at the time of their arrest. "They had training, they had maps, and I think they were very close to moving on this."
The investigation began after a store clerk store told the FBI that some customers had asked him to transfer onto DVD some video footage of them firing assault weapons and screaming about jihad.
The FBI asked two informants — both foreign-born men who entered the U.S. illegally and had criminal records — to befriend the suspects. Both informants were paid and were offered help obtaining legal resident status.
2 comments:
Finally, a conviction on something of subtance
As one who works on Ft. Dix in the target area (Cantonment Area) I have personally been waiting for this conviction to become a reality for a year and a half.
The acquittal doesn't bother me. Thanks to timely Federal interdiction these jiahdists were not able to execute their mission.
However, the general plot 'to kill as many soldiers as possible' on Ft. Dix earned these five a life sentence.
It is also an absolute certainty that numerous innocent civilians would have been alongside the targeted soldiers - par for the course of all acts of Islamic Jihad.
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