WASHINGTON -- The Libyan militant accused of masterminding the deadly Benghazi attacks appeared for the first time in an American courtroom, pleading innocent Saturday to a terrorism-related charge nearly two weeks after he was captured by special forces.
Ahmed Abu Khattala's court-appointed lawyer, Michelle Peterson, entered the plea, which was in response to a single charge of conspiracy. He faces additional charges.
The suspect was flown to Washington, D.C., by helicopter shortly after sunrise from a Navy warship where he had been held since his capture two weeks ago in Libya by U.S. special operations forces.
During his initial court appearance, the defendant listened via headphones to a translation of the proceedings. He wore a two-piece black tracksuit, had a beard and long curly hair, both mostly gray, and kept his hands -- which were not handcuffed -- behind his back.
He spoke just two words, both in Arabic. He replied "yes" when asked to swear to tell the truth and "no" when asked whether he was having trouble understanding the proceeding.
He looked impassively at U.S. Magistrate Judge John Facciola for most of the hearing. Facciola ordered the defendant's continued detention, but the judge did not say where Abu Khattala would be held.
He is next scheduled to appear in court Tuesday for a detention hearing, followed by a July 8 status hearing.
The Justice Department has charged Abu Khattala with three counts in the attacks on the U.S. mission in Benghazi and a nearby CIA facility on Sept. 11, 2012. The attacks resulted in the deaths of the U.S. Ambassador to Libya J. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans.
A grand jury indictment handed up under seal Thursday and made public Saturday said Abu Khattala participated in a conspiracy to provide material support and resources to terrorists in the attacks.
That crime is punishable by up to life in prison. The government said it soon would file more charges against Abu Khattala.
Moving Abu Khattala to Washington to face charges was a step forward for the Obama administration. It had been criticized for moving too slowly to apprehend suspects, with Democrats and Republicans injecting partisan statements into the debate over proper embassy security and accurate assessments of militant threats.
Some also criticized the administration's decision to prosecute Abu Khattala in civilian court rather than through the military tribunal system at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Current and former senior U.S. law enforcement officials briefed on the investigation of Abu Khattala said the next phase of the case -- proving the charges against him in federal court -- would be challenging because the attacks occurred in a country that is not friendly to the United States.
FBI investigators were not able to visit the crime scenes in Benghazi to collect evidence until several weeks after the attacks because of concerns about security. The case also relies on testimony from Libyan witnesses who will have to be flown to the United States to testify and who may not hold up well to cross-examination.
Yet law enforcement officials expressed confidence in the work.
"We have plenty of evidence to convict this guy," one senior official said. "Now it's just a matter of getting him to the courthouse."
The hostile environment in Libya and the difficulty of tracking down and interviewing all the witnesses were among the reasons the investigation took so long.
"We were dealing with one of the most nonpermissive environments at the time, and our guys were able to put together a case," the senior official said.
While U.S. intelligence agencies were able to intercept electronic conversations that could help the investigation, their classified nature makes them problematic to use in a public criminal trial, the officials said.
The case is expected to be presented mainly on eyewitness accounts and video from the scene. Hundreds of hours of video from security cameras and other sources were analyzed to produce a narrative of the time leading up to the attacks, the siege of the mission and the CIA annex, and the aftermath, one of the officials said.
"The Department of Justice bats nearly 1,000 percent with these types of extraterritorial cases, but that's because they put in so much diligence on the front end of the investigations," said Neil MacBride, who was the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia from 2009-13. "You only have one shot here. You don't go to the other side of the world to grab someone without knowing that there is a high probability of a conviction."
The Justice Department "rarely asks the Department of Defense to grab someone," MacBride said. "And the Department of Defense isn't going to put its Special Operations forces on the ground without a high degree of certainty about a case."
U.S. commandos captured Abu Khattala in a raid on a seaside villa outside Benghazi. He was taken to the Navy warship -- the amphibious transport ship New York -- in the Mediterranean, where he was questioned by interrogators seeking to learn what he knew about past or planned attacks.
A U.S. official said Abu Khattala had been advised of his Miranda rights at some point during his trip and continued talking after that. The official wasn't authorized to discuss an ongoing investigation by name and spoke on condition of anonymity.
The warship left the Mediterranean about a week ago and will return to its home port near Jacksonville, Fla. It had been sent to the Mediterranean to be part of the mission to capture Abu Khattala.
The ship typically carries four Osprey aircraft and two helicopters, one of which was used for the transfer Saturday. Its bow was forged with steel from the World Trade Center towers.
About a half-dozen FBI agents who had been with Abu Khattala during his interrogation aboard the ship accompanied him on the helicopter trip to Washington. By midday Saturday, he was being held under tight security at the federal courthouse about a mile from the White House.
Washington is an unusual place for a high-profile terrorism suspect to face charges. Since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, nearly all such suspects have been tried in federal courts in New York or Alexandria, Va.
Abu Khattala was a prominent figure in Benghazi's circles of extremists. He was popular among young radicals and lived openly in the eastern Libyan city, spotted at cafes and other public places, even after the Obama administration publicly named him as a suspect.
He is accused of being a member of the Ansar al-Shariah group, the powerful Islamic militia that the U.S. believes was behind the attack.
He acknowledged in an interview with The Associated Press in January that he was present during the storming of the U.S. mission in Benghazi. But he denied involvement in the attack, saying he was trying to organize a rescue of trapped people.
In the attack, gunmen fired rocket-propelled grenades and stormed the mission, with many waving the black banners of Ansar al-Shariah.
The compound's main building was set ablaze. Stevens suffocated inside and another American was shot dead. At the time, several witnesses said they saw Abu Khattala directing fighters at the site.
Later in the evening, gunmen attacked and shelled a safe house, killing two more Americans. No evidence has emerged that Abu Khattala was involved in the later attack.
The violence in Libya on the 11th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon became a political controversy in the United States.
Republicans accused the White House, as the 2012 presidential election neared, of intentionally misleading the public about what prompted the attacks. The White House said Republicans were politicizing a national tragedy.
The Republican-led House started investigating the Benghazi attacks less than a month after they occurred, spotlighting the administration's initial claim that they stemmed from "spontaneously inspired" demonstrations over an anti-Islamist video. Officials later backed off that claim and said attackers linked to terrorist groups stormed the diplomatic compound and set fire to it.
Information for this article was contributed by Eric Schmitt and Michael S. Schmidt of The New York Times; by Mark Sherman, Pete Yost, Eric Tucker and Robert Burns of The Associated Press; and by Cheyenne Hopkins of Bloomberg News.
A Section on 06/29/2014