An FBI informant said yesterday he wanted to put "the world on notice" but not actually commit suicide when he set himself on fire outside the White House in November. Testifying at the Brooklyn federal trial of two Yemeni men accused of plotting to help terrorism, informant Mohamed Alanssi said his suicidal gesture was actually designed to try and get more money from his FBI handlers. "It was my right to get as much money as I can," Alanssi said under questioning by defense attorney Howard Jacobs, who is representing Mohammed Ali Hassan al-Moayad, a Muslim cleric. "I was very upset and I had no money," Alanssi, 53, explained later under cross-examination by Assistant U.S. Attorney Kelly Moore. "My wife is sick. She has cancer. I can't go back to Yemen because my life is in danger in al-Yemen."Al-Moayad, 56, is on trial with his aide Mohammed Mohsen Yahya Zayed, 31, on charges they conspired to provide about $2 million and other assistance to the terror groups al-Qaida and Hamas. Alanssi, a short, bespectacled, heavyset man with close-cropped gray hair, is the main FBI informant in the case. It was Alanssi and another FBI operative who met with al-Moayad and Zayed in January 2003 in Germany. Secret tapes that were made of those meetings comprise the prosecution's main evidence in the case. After Alanssi got into a dispute with his FBI handlers last year and tried to set himself on fire, Brooklyn federal prosecutors apparently thought better of calling him as their witness. Instead defense attorneys called him but his testimony appears to have hurt their cause at times, particularly when he blurted out that al-Moayad is linked to terrorists. Yesterday, Alanssi repeated his claim that al-Moayad said he personally gave $20 million to Osama bin Laden several years before Sept. 11, 2001, and gave $3.5 million to Hamas. Alanssi also stuck to his story that it was his job to travel around and try to root out terrorism. He again insisted that al-Moayad's charitable bakery in Yemen was "a fake."
Alanssi was argumentative with defense attorneys and sometimes avoided answering queries directly. He occasionally appeared to smirk at their questions. Asked by Zayed's attorney Jonathan Marks how he learned to say he couldn't answer questions with a simple yes or no answer, Alanssi had a response that drew laughs: "Through the movie, 'Law & Order.'"