US says Padilla gave himself to al Qaeda

MIAMI, May 14 (Reuters) US citizen Jose Padilla provided rare support for terrorism by offering himself to al Qaeda as a trainee, a prosecutor told a jury today in the trial of the former ''dirty bomber'' suspect.

Padilla, 36, and two co-defendants face life in prison if convicted on charges of conspiring to ''murder, kidnap and maim'' people overseas and providing material support for terrorists.

In opening statements to the jury, Assistant US Attorney Brian Frazier said the defendants were part of a Florida support cell that provided money and recruits for Islamist groups waging a violent jihad, or holy war, around the globe.

He said defendants Adham Amin Hassoun and Kifah Wael Jayyousi provided plane tickets, sleeping bags and satellite phones to al Qaeda-affiliated groups fighting in Lebanon, Somalia, Kosovo and Chechnya in the 1990s.

Padilla went farther, Frazier said, by going to an al Qaeda camp in Afghanistan to train as a fighter for a group bent on destroying his homeland.

''Padilla provided his own form of material support by volunteering to train with the terrorists,'' Frazier said.

''Joining an al Qaeda training camp was an incredibly rare thing for an American to do.'' Padilla is the only American to go from being an ''enemy combatant'' in the war on terrorism to a defendant in a US criminal court. Some 385 foreigners are being held as enemy combatants at the US Naval base at Guantanamo Bay, and scores of them could face special military tribunals.

The FBI arrested him at Chicago's O'Hare airport in May 2002 as a material witness in an investigation into the September 11 attacks, and the government said he was plotting to set off a radiological ''dirty bomb'' in the United States.

FORMER GANG MEMBER President George W Bush sent him to a US military jail for 3 and 1/2 years as an ''enemy combatant'' but dropped the designation as the Supreme Court weighed a challenge to his authority to do that.

The former fast-food worker and street gang member was added to an existing indictment against Hassoun, a Lebanese-born Palestinian computer programmer, and Jayyousi, a Jordanian-born US citizen and former school administrator.

The ''dirty bomb'' plot was based on allegations from alleged al Qaeda operatives who claim they were tortured before being sent to Guantanamo.

The indictment doesn't mention the plot and if prosecutors do, defense lawyers will be allowed to discuss the Bush administration's interrogation techniques and secret CIA prisons.

US District Judge Marcia Cooke forbade prosecutors from linking the defendants to the September 11 attacks, which they are not accused of supporting or taking part in. But she rejected defense requests to ban the word ''terrorist'' from the trial.

Defense attorneys argued that the Muslim defendants offered support to what they believed were legitimate charities providing aid to innocent Muslims under attack in war-torn regions such as Bosnia, Chechnya and Kosovo.

''The government is twisting the facts out of all recognition'' said one of Hassoun's attorneys, Jeanne Baker.

Padilla's lawyers will challenge the authenticity of a key piece of evidence against him, a form that prosecutors say bears his fingerprints and was his enrollment application for an al Qaeda training camp he attended for several months from July 2000.

The jury will hear more than 100 wiretapped phone conversations, mostly in Arabic, in which the defendants discussed family trips, sports and food. Prosecutors say there were coded references to violent jihadist plots and weapons.

Reuters HK VP0042