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Prosecutor: Al-Arian jurors must infer links

She says "common sense" connects Sami Al-Arian and others to financial support of PIJ violence.

By MEG LAUGHLIN
Published November 8, 2005

TAMPA - Use your common sense to see the connections. That's what federal prosecutor Cherie Krigsman told jurors Monday as she wrapped up part of the government's case in the five-month trial of Sami Al-Arian.

Her closing argument to a packed courtroom began with a haunting video of a suicide bombing in Israel's West Bank in 1995, which showed American student Alisa Flatow, 20, lying unconscious on scorched grass beside a burned-out bus, with bleeding people around her.

"Hot metal shrapnel, propelled at blinding speed, murdered her," said Krigsman, who blamed Al-Arian and his three co-defendants in the courtroom for indirectly causing the tragedy, through their work for Palestinian Islamic Jihad. But, she said, it would take "common sense" and "connecting the dots" to see the link.

Acquittal or conviction of the defendants may depend on whether jurors see such a link or a large hole at the center of the government's case.

Al-Arian, Sameeh Hammoudeh, Ghassan Ballut and Hatem Fariz are charged with conspiring to raise money in the United States for PIJ violence in Israel and the Occupied Territories. The PIJ has claimed responsibility for hundreds of deaths.

"The men you got to know don't strap bombs to their bodies," Krigsman said, referring to the four defendants. "But each man in the conspiracy ... raised money for the overarching goal ... of murder and extortion."

Jurors could "infer" this, she said, by looking at the words of the defendants - words from fundraising conferences in the early 1990s, words from faxes and phone conversations secretly recorded by the FBI, and words in documents taken from the defendants' homes and offices.

By the end of the day Monday, Krigsman had tracked the defendants' words from 1990 to 1995, when a U.S. executive order made it a criminal act to support Palestinian Islamic Jihad. She pointed jurors to words spoken about Al-Arian at a 1991 fundraising conference in Cleveland, when he was described as the head of the Islamic Committee for Palestine, "the active arm of the PIJ." She called jurors' attention to a 1994 fax Al-Arian wrote to PIJ headquarters after a suicide bombing in which he said "pride and glory overwhelm us."

"Words are the fuel of criminal conspiracy," said Krigsman.

U.S. District Judge James S. Moody has said that Krigsman and her team of prosecutors must show that defendants had knowledge of PIJ violence, intended to support it with more than words, and did. It is not enough, said the judge, to show an association with the PIJ or words in sympathy, or support of a legal aim of the organization, like charitable giving.

"The defendants want you to believe the money they raised went for charity," said Krigsman. "But your common sense tells you that does not add up."

Today, Krigsman will take two to three more hours to complete the prosecution's closing argument and perhaps point jurors to evidence that shows why defendants' claims of charitable giving don't "add up."

Then, Al-Arian's attorneys will try to counter her argument.

[Last modified November 8, 2005, 02:15:36]