Defense in treason case seeks info on al-Awlaki

Attorneys for a Muslim scholar convicted in 2005 of soliciting treason on Friday pressed a choose to get prosecutors to disclose data they imagine could demonstrate that American-born al-Qaida chief Anwar al-Awlaki was at the time a authorities informant.

Ali Al-Timimi of Fairfax was the religious chief for a team of northern Virginia Muslims who performed paintball to teach for holy war. He was convicted and sentenced to lifestyle in jail for exhorting some of them to be a part of the Taliban and fight versus the U.S. right after the Sept. 11 assaults. Several of them received as considerably as Pakistan, schooling with a militant team known as Lashkar-e-Taiba.

Al-Timimi’s attorneys explained Friday at a hearing in U.S. District Court docket in Alexandria that they are suspicious about a 2002 go to al-Awlaki compensated to al-Timimi. The defense now suspects al-Awlaki, who has considering that been killed, went there as an informant to get incriminating information and facts on al-Timimi. If so, they say al-Awlaki’s job as an informant really should have been disclosed at trial.

At the conference, al-Awlaki purportedly tried to get al-Timimi’s support in recruiting adult males for jihad, but al-Timimi rejected him. Al-Timimi’s attorney, Jonathan Turley, stated govt documentation of the assembly would refute the circumstance built at demo by prosecutors that al-Timimi was urging Muslims to fight. They also say it would clearly show that al-Timimi had been in the government’s crosshairs back in 2002, which would have contradicted other testimony that the govt did not start off investigating al-Timimi until finally 2003.

The suspicions about al-Awlaki stem from newly found out facts that FBI agents concerned in Al-Timimi’s situation may have facilitated al-Awlaki’s return to the United States in 2002. Al-Awlaki experienced been imam of a northern Virginia mosque at the time of the 2001 attacks but still left the U.S. soon thereafter.

He had make contact with with some of the Sept. 11 hijackers, and in yrs soon after the 2001 attacks emerged as a top al-Qaida leader prior to getting killed in a drone strike in 2011. There has been debate as to no matter whether al-Awlaki hid very long-held al-Qaida sympathies in his time in the U.S. or radicalized soon after leaving the several years immediately after Sept. 11.

Also released earlier this year ended up FBI paperwork showing that agents noticed al-Awlaki in 2001 and 2002 employing prostitutes, but in no way brought charges in opposition to him.

Prosecutors say they’ve turned above almost everything needed of them. In court docket papers and at Friday’s hearing, they gave no details on regardless of whether al-Awlaki might have been an informant. As an alternative, they say they are only obligated to switch around facts that would assist the defense, and claimed the law offers prosecutors the discretion to make that perseverance.

The regulation “does not entitle any defendant to the disclosure of the extent and nature of the government’s investigative instruments or techniques merely due to the fact he suspects that elements are in the government’s possession that could establish intriguing to him,” prosecutor Gordon Kromberg wrote.

U.S. District Decide Leonie Brinkema mentioned she will challenge a composed ruling later on on the motion, but expressed question about the protection requests. She said she was persuaded in portion mainly because of magic formula evidence the authorities submitted in the case, which even Turley, who holds a protection clearance, has not been permitted to see.

Al-Timimi attended Friday’s listening to but did not converse, sporting a jail jumpsuit and sporting extended hair and a beard appreciably grayer than at his 2005 trial.