A jury on Tuesday convicted four followers of Saudi dissident Osama bin Laden in a plot to murder US citizens around the world, including the 1998 bombings of two US embassies in Africa that killed 224 people, including 12 Americans.
The panel found the four guilty on all 302 counts, with two of the men facing a death penalty hearing on Wednesday. All four are expected to appeal the rulings.
A jury of seven women and five men found Mohamed Rashed Daoud al-'Owhali, 24, Khalfan Khamis Mohamed, 27, Wadee El-Haj, 40, and Mohamed Sadeek Odeh, 36, guilty of conspiring to murder US citizens, and officers and employees of U.S. embassies and military facilities.
The verdict marks the first US convictions for crimes stemming from bin Laden's activities.
After 12 days of deliberations, the jury found al-'Owhali and Mohamed guilty of charges that expose them to the death penalty for their part in the blasts that ripped through the U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.
Al-'Owhali is a Saudi who prosecutors said rode in the truck used in the Nairobi bombing, and Mohamed is a Tanzanian convicted of taking part in the Dar es Salaam attack.
US District Court Judge Leonard Sand instructed jurors to return on Wednesday to consider whether the two men should be sentenced to death or to life in prison without parole. "That is the only issue before you," he said.
The two others, El-Haj, a naturalized US citizen born in Lebanon, and Odeh, a Palestinian born in Jordan, could face life in prison. Charged in the overall plot, they were not accused of directly carrying out the bombings.
VERDICT APPLAUDED
Families of victims applauded the verdict.
"It was bittersweet," Sue Bartley, whose husband was killed, said of the verdict. "We couldn't have asked for a better verdict. The jury did a good job."
Both her husband Julian Bartley, consul general at the US embassy in Nairobi, and her son Jay, who was working there for the summer, were killed in the explosion.
"We are very pleased, but it does not minimize the loss for the families whether they be Kenyans, Tanzanians or Americans," said her daughter Edith.
Lawyer for all four of the men said they would appeal, with Odeh's attorney expected to argue the evidence was too thin to support his client's conviction.
Prosecutors said Odeh stayed in the same Nairobi hotel as the bombers and left town the night before the blast. He was arrested in Pakistan the day of the bombing, and clothing he was carrying was found to contain traces of explosives.
"We're going to be looking at the evidence to show the court of appeal that this is just not sufficient to support a verdict of this magnitude," said Anthony Ricco, lawyer for Odeh. He admitted, however, he faced an "uphill battle."
US State Department spokesman Phil Reeker said the department was "very pleased at the guilty verdicts reached in this initial trial of suspects in the 1998 bombings of our two embassies in East Africa."
Bin Laden, who has been indicted as the mastermind behind the bombings, is one of America's most wanted fugitives. He is believed in Afghanistan, and the US government is offering a $5 million reward for information leading to his arrest.
The Saudi exile has been suspected of other plots against Americans, including a 1999 scheme to bomb U.S. millennium celebrations and the October attack in Yemen on the USS Cole.
But the embassy bombing case is the only one in which bin Laden has been indicted or in which defendants have formally been accused of joining in his schemes.
On Monday South Africa's Constitutional Court said authorities acted unlawfully in extraditing Mohamed and violated his rights by failing to secure assurances from U.S. authorities that he would not be executed if convicted.
'AFGHAN' CONNECTION
Several other defendants are awaiting trials in New York, including Mamdouh Mahmud Salim who was severed from the current trial after he allegedly attacked a prison guard on Nov. 1, stabbing him in the eye and brain with a sharpened comb.
Salim, allegedly a high-level adviser to bin Laden, is scheduled to go on trial for attacking the guard in July.
Prosecutors said the four defendants conspired with bin Laden as part of a ruthless plan "to kill Americans anywhere in the world they can be found."
For example, they said that from 1992 bin Laden issued fatwas, or religious decrees, to members and associates of his militant al Qaeda organization against US forces stationed on the Saudi Arabian peninsula and in the Horn of Africa. In 1996 he issued a "Declaration of Jihad" against Americans.
Prosecutors said al Qaeda is a "terrorist" group that bin Laden formed in the 1980s in Afghanistan to help Muslims fight the Soviet invasion. He changed the focus of the group after Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990.
Bin Laden's rage over the presence of US troops in Saudi Arabia -- home to the holiest Islamic sites -- led to the bombing of the embassies eight years later, they said.
Some of the key testimony came from FBI agents who described confessions allegedly made by Mohamed and al-'Owhali about their roles in the attacks.
Defense lawyers had argued the agents' testimony was unreliable because they did not tape the interviews -- New York (Reuters)
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