A cause celebre in Egypt, where he has bitterly opposed President Hosni Mubarak’s government, Sheik Omar has become one of the Clinton administration’s diplomatic headaches. Mubarak’s government, fearful of the sheik’s ability to stir up Egyptian fundamentalists, doesn’t want him back-while Washington, aware of his role as guru to many of the suspects in the New York bombing cases, has been trying to deport him. In July, Cairo agreed to seek Abdel-Rahman’s extradition back to Egypt. Then Washington discovered that the extradition request wouldn’t stand up in court. The sheik’s lawyers sought his deportation to Afghanistan, which could give him a base from which to pursue his diatribes against Mubarak and other Arab moderates.
Through all this, Attorney General Janet Reno opposed filing criminal charges against the sheik for lack of compelling evidence of his involvement in the alleged bombing attempts. The attorney general finally approved his indictment on the basis of a rarely used 1909 law proscribing “seditious conspiracy” against the federal government. Seditious conspiracy is something of a catchall charge-broad but vague, a prosecutor’s delight and a defense lawyer’s nightmare. But experts warned that such cases can be fraught with complex legal questions about the line between free speech and criminal conduct: one of them likened the government’s strategy to charging “Pat Buchanan as a co-conspirator to the guy who shot an abortion doctor.” “It’s essentially a political move to get rid of him,” said another source who is close to the FBI.
The new indictment links the ongoing criminal cases against seven suspects in the World Trade Center bombing with 15 defendants in the U.N. bombing case. It also includes new charges against El Sayyid Nosair, the Egyptian fundamentalist who was acquitted of the 1990 murder of Meir Kahane, founder of the Jewish Defense League. Nosair. who was convicted of assault and weapons possession, has been serving a seven- to 22-year sentence in Attica State Prison. He has now been charged with committing Kahane’s murder to aid in a larger conspiracy–a charge that, according to federal officials, does not violate the constitutional rule against double jeopardy.
But the sheik is the main attraction. Prosecutors must prove he knew enough and said enough about his followers’ activities to be regarded as the bead of an organization bent on waging “a war of urban terrorism against the United States.” This may not be easy. Although he was repeatedly taped by Emad Salem, the FBI informant, Abdel-Rahman avoided giving direct orders or even expressing his approval–when plans to bomb targets like the U.N. headquarters were being discussed. “Can you imagine anything more ludicrous than [the idea that] the sheik was operational?” his lawyer, Harry C. Batchelder, said last week. “Do you really believe…the sheik had the final say over anything?”
Still, the show must go on-and will, in what may well be a courtroom circus, sometime next year. Each of the 15 defendants will have his own lawyer, all of whom will fight the prosecution and, when necessary, with each other as well. The prosecutors, meanwhile, must try to draw connections among different groups of defendants who did different things at different times, then connect them all to the bearded little man in the red and white hat. “If he gets acquitted, he gets the mantle of heroism…in the Middle East,” a worried State Department official said last week. “It would be a diplomatic disaster if we lose.”
