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Informant: Fort Dix suspects trained for 'jihad'
A paid FBI informant in the case of five men accused of plotting to kill soldiers on Fort Dix said he didn't understand at first why his handlers sent him to make contacts in a place that hardly seemed like a hub of criminal activity. In July 2006, Besnik Bakalli was to seek out three Albanian-speaking brothers in a Dunkin' Donuts shop in Cinnaminson in suburban South Jersey. A few weeks later, he told jurors, he saw why the men might seem dangerous to authorities: Riding with them and another suspect to a fishing spot on the Jersey shore, the men laughed as they showed him videos of American troops being shot by snipers in Iraq and U.S. military vehicles exploding. "I was scared," Bakalli told jurors. "I never saw these videos before. I'm thinking, 'Who are these people and what am I doing here?'" The accused men, all in their 20s at the time of their May 2007 arrests, are foreign-born Muslims who lived for years in the comfortable Philadelphia suburb of Cherry Hill. They are charged with conspiracy to kill military personnel, attempted murder and weapons offenses. If convicted, the men could face life in prison. The government built the case against them largely with hundreds of hours of secret recordings made by Bakalli and another paid informant, Mahmoud Omar, who spent 13 days testifying earlier in the trial. Defense lawyers deny the men were seriously planning anything. In more than five hours of testimony Monday, Bakalli said the defendants talked about Islam, their admiration for Osama bin Laden, martyrdom, a war between America and the Muslim world and guns. But he was not asked by the prosecutor who questioned him about either Fort Dix or any specific plan to attack it. Bakalli told jurors he was in jail in May 2006 as the government tried to have him deported. FBI agents came to him and offered him work as an informant. Bakalli, who was once convicted , and later pardoned , for shooting a man in his native Albania, said he was willing to help the government in the hope that he could stay in the United States. "I can have a better life here that I never had in my country," Bakalli told jurors. So in early July 2006, his handlers sent him to the Dunkin' Donuts. Indeed, three Albanian brothers , Dritan, Eljvir and Shain Duka , showed up. Bakalli told jurors he spoke Albanian into his cell phone to get the attention of the men. It worked. That day, he drank coffee with them. Within a few weeks, he was going to their mosque and, later that month, on the fishing trip with them and Mohamad Shnewer. In February 2007, he went with the men and others on a weeklong retreat at a rented house in Pennsylvania's Pocono Mountains. He said he hoped the trip would merely be a relaxing vacation. Deputy U.S. Attorney William Fitzpatrick asked him what the trip turned out to be. "Training," Bakalli said, "for jihad" , or holy war. He said the men spent the first night looking for guns to buy, then went to shooting ranges and played paintball. "It was not a vacation for me," Bakalli said. "I started to figure that out." On one recording, made the night before they went to the Poconos, Dritan Duka is heard as he is showing a gun to Bakalli, who had told the men that he spent three months in the Kosovo Liberation Army. Bakalli, who keeps describing guns as "hot" and "cute," tried to open the weapon. Dritan Duka teased him when he wasn't able to do so. Fitzpatrick asked if he was afraid he'd be discovered as an informant. Bakalli said he was. Posted by: ryuge 2008-12-02 |
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