Bin Laden looms over Padilla terrorism trial

MIAMI, June 26 (Reuters) Osama bin Laden's face and ominous words loomed over the US terrorism trial of former ''dirty bomber'' suspect Jose Padilla today as jurors were shown a 10-year-old videotaped interview of the al Qaeda leader.

Jurors were attentive but poker-faced as they watched the CNN interview on a giant screen in a Miami courtroom. Padilla and two co-defendants are on trial on charges of conspiring to murder, kidnap and maim people overseas and of providing material support for terrorism. They are not accused of having any direct connection to bin Laden.

In the 1997 interview, made long before bin Laden launched the September 11 attacks and became one of the world's most-hunted men, a machine gun rests at his side as he praises the deaths of US troops in Saudi Arabia and Somalia.

Prosecutors played it as a prelude to airing secretly recorded phone conversations in which defendants Adham Amin Hassoun and Kifah Wael Jayyousi chuckle as they discuss the interview after it aired.

Hassoun is heard saying of bin Laden, ''May God protect him.'' Jayyousi called the interview ''very powerful'' and notes with seeming approval that bin Laden condemned the US treatment of ''blind sheikh'' Omar Abdel Rahman, who is imprisoned for life in connection with the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and other terrorist acts.

The bin Laden tape has no direct bearing on the charges in the Miami trial, which do not involve attacks in the United States or on US citizens. Prosecutors played the tape and the phone conversations as evidence that Hassoun, a Lebanese-born Palestinian, and Jayyousi, a Jordanian-born US citizen, supported violent Islamist groups.

Defense lawyers vigorously objected, and they called the tape inflammatory and irrelevant.

NO CONNECTION TO SEPTEMBER 11 US District Judge Marcia Cooke told jurors to ignore it when deciding Padilla's fate since there was no evidence he ever saw or discussed the interview.

Padilla was arrested by the FBI at Chicago's O'Hare airport in 2002, declared an ''enemy combatant'' by President George W Bush and held without charge in a military jail for 2-1/2 years.

The government said then he was plotting to set off a radiological ''dirty bomb'' in the United States but no mention of those allegations was made when he was transferred into the civilian justice system and added to the Miami terrorism case.

Judge Cooke said jurors could consider the videotape as proof of the other two defendants' state of mind but reminded them that the charges had nothing to do with September 11.

The defendants are accused of running a support cell that provided money and recruits for Islamist militants in Chechnya, Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan and other nations beginning in the mid-1990s.

The charges allege Hassoun recruited Padilla, a convert to Islam, at a south Florida mosque and sent him to Egypt and Afghanistan to learn Arabic and train with al Qaeda.

All three defendants face life in prison if convicted. Their trial, now in the sixth week of testimony, is expected to last through August.

Defense lawyers said Padilla went to the Middle East to study Arabic and become an Islamic cleric. They said the other two were involved in charities that provided innocent aid to Muslims in conflict zones but did not advocate violence.

REUTERS GL RAI2350