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Aswat primer
A key suspect in the July 7 transit bombings in London has long been wanted by U.S. authorities for prosecution in this country, particularly after federal officials developed evidence three years ago that he was trying to help establish a terrorist training camp on the West Coast to wage war against Americans. But federal investigators said they did not locate Haroon Rashid Aswat, a British Muslim of Indian descent, even after they agreed to give his alleged collaborator in Seattle a light prison sentence in the hope that the man would lead them to him.Justice Department officials in Washington said Sunday that the Seattle man, Earnest James Ujaama, had been extremely helpful in putting together an indictment against another London Muslim, Egyptian cleric Abu Hamza al Masri, but that he had not led them directly to Aswat. Had they found Aswat, officials conceded, it might have prevented the deadly London attacks on three subway trains and a bus that killed 52 people, plus the four suicide bombers. Investigators in Britain believe that Aswat had perhaps as many as 20 cellphone conversations with some of the London suicide bombers. But U.S. authorities questioned a report in Sunday's Seattle Times quoting unnamed current and former federal officials as saying that Washington had blocked Aswat's indictment in Seattle. "That's obviously not true," one senior Justice Department official with intimate knowledge of the Seattle case said Sunday. "There were plenty of terrorism cases handled around the country â in Buffalo, in Chicago, in North Carolina. The districts where the suspects or targets resided is generally where they were prosecuted." But, he said, indictments of suspects living abroad were usually assigned to the U.S. attorney's office in New York, which specializes in extraditing them to this country for trial. Jim Neff, investigations editor for the Seattle Times, said the paper stood behind its report. Posted by: Dan Darling 2005-07-25 |
| http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=124958 |