AP: Defense in Treason Case Seeks Info on Al-Awlaki
Lawyers for a Muslim scholar convicted in 2005 of soliciting treason on Friday pressed a judge to order prosecutors to disclose information they believe could show that American-born al-Qaida leader Anwar al-Awlaki was once a government informant.
Ali Al-Timimi of Fairfax was the spiritual leader for a group of northern Virginia Muslims who played paintball to train for holy war. He was convicted and sentenced to life in prison for exhorting some of them to join the Taliban and fight against the U.S. after the Sept. 11 attacks. Several of them got as far as Pakistan, training with a militant group called Lashkar-e-Taiba.
Al-Timimi's lawyers said Friday at a hearing in U.S. District Court in Alexandria that they are suspicious about a 2002 visit al-Awlaki paid to al-Timimi. The defense now suspects al-Awlaki, who has since been killed, went there as an informant to get incriminating information on al-Timimi. If so, they say al-Awlaki's role as an informant should have been disclosed at trial.
At the meeting, al-Awlaki purportedly tried to get al-Timimi's help in recruiting men for jihad, but al-Timimi rejected him. Al-Timimi's lawyer, Jonathan Turley, said government documentation of the meeting would refute the case made at trial by prosecutors that al-Timimi was urging Muslims to fight. They also say it would show that al-Timimi had been in the government's crosshairs back in 2002, which would have contradicted other testimony that the government did not begin investigating al-Timimi until 2003.
The suspicions about al-Awlaki stem from newly discovered information that FBI agents involved in Al-Timimi's case may have facilitated al-Awlaki's return to the United States in 2002. Al-Awlaki had been imam of a northern Virginia mosque at the time of the 2001 attacks but left the U.S. shortly thereafter.
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