Mar 23 2006

Terrorist Turned Informant Turned Witness

Published by at 2:59 pm under All General Discussions

Interesting, if little publicized, story about a terrorist in New York who turned states evidence on London bomb suspects:

An FBI informant who has pleaded guilty in the United States to links with al-Qaida arrived at a court Thursday to testify against seven alleged British terrorists.

Mohammed Junaid Babar, 30, a U.S. citizen of Pakistani descent, was taken from a high-security police station in north London to the Central Criminal Court in a van surrounded by police on motorcycles, with a helicopter circling overhead.

Babar, from New York City, pleaded guilty to various terrorist offenses at a federal court in New York in 2004 and described traveling to the Pakistani province of Waziristan to supply cash and military equipment to al-Qaida suspects.

Two of the charges related to what U.S. prosecutors described as the “British bombing plot,” prosecutor David Waters has told a jury at London’s Central Criminal Court. At alleged terror training camps in Pakistan, Babar helped plot an attack on Britain with a group of seven British men, supplying them with details to make an ammonium nitrate fertilizer bomb, Waters said.

A reporting restriction imposed by the London court _ intended to give the seven men a fair trial _ prevents any publication of details about the information he supplied.

Sometimes these gag orders for trials seem to put more people at risk than protecting the accused.  I think the shock of the news would less damaging to the defense if it came out earlier and had a chance to be assessed as opposed to being a bombshell in court.

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