New York | Tuesday
UNITED States prosecutors will ask a Manhattan jury on Tuesday to send a follower of Saudi dissident Osama bin Laden to his death for the 1998 bombing of the US Embassy in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.
Prosecutors are scheduled to begin the penalty phase of the case against Khalfan Khamis Mohamed, a 27-year-old Tanzanian, with opening statements in Manhattan federal court.
Mohamed was convicted with three others on May 29 of conspiring with bin Laden to kill Americans in a broad plot that included the 1998 twin bombings of the US embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. The two explosions killed 224 people, including 12 Americans, and injured more than 4,000.
In addition to participating in the larger conspiracy, Mohamed was also found guilty of having a direct role in the Tanzanian blast that killed 11 people.
During the guilt phase of the trial, an FBI agent testified that Mohamed admitted renting the house in which the bomb was built, helping grind the TNT explosive, loading the bomb on to the truck and riding part of the way to the embassy.
For Mohamed to receive the death penalty, the jury of seven women and five men must reach a unanimous agreement that execution is the appropriate punishment. If they cannot agree, US District Judge Leonard Sand must sentence the defendant to life in prison without possibility of parole.
The same jurors have already shown their reluctance on the death penalty, last week sparing the life of a Saudi man convicted for his direct role in the Nairobi bombing. Some jurors said that lethal injection was ”very humane and the defendant may not suffer” and that life imprisonment was a harsher punishment than death.
Some also said they did not want the defendant to become a martyr for militant Islamic causes and that killing him would not ease the suffering of the victims or family members.
The sentencing phase of Mohamed’s trial begins the day Juan Raul Garza is to receive a lethal injection in the same death chamber as Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh at the federal penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana.
Garza was sentenced to die for committing a drug-related murder and ordering two others as leader of a huge marijuana smuggling ring. – Reuters
ZA *NOW:
Live webcast of McVeigh execution? April 19, 2001