A Tanzanian welder identified the first Guantanamo Bay detainee to be tried in a U.S. civilian court as one of two men who purchased metal gas tanks in the weeks before two U.S. embassies were bombed in East Africa.
Ahmed Ghailani, 36, is charged with helping to buy a Nissan truck used by members of an al-Qaida cell to bomb the U.S. Embassy in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, on Aug. 7, 1998. He’s charged with conspiracy for that attack and a near-simultaneous bombing at the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi, Kenya. The attacks killed 224 people, including 12 U.S. citizens.
Felix John Lekule testified Tuesday in federal court in Manhattan that he used acetylene and oxygen tanks in his welding business and that about a month before theembassy bombings, two men approached him to buy tanks three separate times. Prosecutors have said gas tanks were used in the attacks.
“One was tall and one was short,” Lekule said through a Swahili interpreter. “The shorter one said he wanted gas tanks,” Lekule said. “He said he wanted many, but I only had one pair.”
Lekule said the men asked that the welder take them to be filled, one with acetylene and two with oxygen. Assistant U.S. attorney Michael Farbiarz told the jury that when the FBI showed Lekule photos in 1998, he identified Ghailani as the shorter customer and Fahid Mohammed Ally Msalam as the taller man.
Msalam, purportedly a member of the al-Qaida cell that carried out both attacks, was killed in a drone strike in January 2009, The Wall StreetJournal has reported.
Lekule said the shorter man paid for the tanks, taking money from a pouch around his waist.
Assistant U.S. attorney Nicholas Lewin told the jurors in opening statements Oct. 13 that witnesses would testify Ghailani purchased large industrial gas tanks, the kind used by welders, that prosecutors say were used in the Tanzania attack.
Lewin said Ghailani and his accomplices loaded about 20 acetylene- and oxygen-filled tanks, each 5 feet tall and weighing about 150 pounds, into a truck. The mix of the gases, along with TNT, was intended “to increase the firebomb, increase the shrapnel and to increase the body count,” Lewin said.
Ghailani has pleaded innocent to the charges. His lawyers told the jury in openingstatements that their client was “duped” by other, more worldly friends who had fled Africa after the attacks.
The U.S. says Ghailani, Msalam and two other coconspirators all fled Nairobi for Karachi, Pakistan, on Aug. 6, 1998, just before the attacks. Ghailani was captured in Pakistan in July 2004 and held by the CIA, where he was subjected to “enhanced interrogation techniques,” the U.S. has said.
He was taken to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in September 2006 and transferred to federal court in New York last year, after the Obama administration said it planned to close Guantanamo and try some terrorism suspects held there in civilian courts.
The case is U.S. v. Ghailani, 98-CR-01023, U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York (Manhattan).
Front Section, Pages 4 on 10/27/2010