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| Fort Dix terror trial now has a court date |
| 2008-01-19 |
| After continual delays, attorneys believe they have set a "reasonable and firm trial date" for the five men accused of plotting an armed jihadist attack on Fort Dix. U.S. District Judge Robert B. Kugler said yesterday that jury selection could begin the week of Sept. 29. He has pushed for a speedy trial in the case, which has been delayed several times because of its complexity and size. Before reaching trial, the lawyers will have to file and argue a flurry of motions - including one to move the case from Camden because of the intense news coverage - and sift through hundreds of hours of video and recorded telephone conversations. Deputy U.S. Attorney William Fitzpatrick said yesterday that the government had declassified recordings of 12,000 conversations made on two of the defendants' home and cell phones. He would not say why the conversations were classified or how investigators captured them. The recordings were made from the summer of 2006 until April 2007, shortly before the men were arrested. He said the 12,000 conversations amount to about 400 hours of recordings, the vast majority of little value to prosecutors. "So we have people ordering pizza and scheduling doctor's appointments and everything else?" the judge asked. Fitzpatrick agreed. The prosecutor also said the government had turned over videos seized from the defendants' homes that included al-Qaeda recruitment spots, Islamic lectures in Arabic, and depictions of the terrorist attacks on 9/11 and the USS Cole. For months, the defense attorneys and their clients have been poring over about 200 hours of conversations secretly recorded by two government informants. In the next 60 days, defense attorneys plan to file motions to challenge the indictment and the searches of their clients' homes, and to throw out their statements to investigators. One of the defense attorneys, Michael Riley, said the men did not make any admissions of guilt in their statements. The five defendants - Mohamed Shnewer, a U.S. citizen born in Jordan; Serdar Tatar, a legal U.S. resident born in Turkey; and Cherry Hill brothers Shain, Eljvir and Dritan Duka, all illegal immigrants from the former Yugoslavia - also pleaded not guilty yesterday to charges in a new indictment filed this week. Troy Archie, the attorney for Eljvir Duka, said he was awaiting a report from handwriting experts who examined a note his client allegedly passed to another inmate in the Federal Detention Center in Philadelphia. Prosecutors said they have surveillance video showing the note's being slid across the floor from Duka's cell to another. In the note, they said, Duka wrote that "we were going to sacrifice all for the sake of Allah in jihad." Archie said he was using two experts hired by Time magazine to examine the letter. Time reported this week those experts found the writing in the note does not match other samples of Duka's writing. At the end of yesterday's status conference, one of the defense attorneys jokingly assured the judge that they would be ready by fall, adding, "Fall '09." |
| Posted by:ryuge |