The defendant, Khaled al-Fawwaz, ran a Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan and helped lead Al Qaeda’s cell in Nairobi, Kenya, before becoming “Bin Laden’s man in London” in 1994, federal prosecutors told the jury.
There, he worked closely with Bin Laden’s then second-in-command, Muhammad Atef, helping Western journalists arrange interviews with Bin Laden and working to publicize Bin Laden’s 1998 fatwa calling for Muslims to kill Americans anywhere in the world.
“Khaled al-Fawwaz was a man who understood the West in a way that Bin Laden, Atef and other Al Qaeda members could not,” a prosecutor, Sean S. Buckley, said last week in a closing argument in Federal District Court in Manhattan. “Before the age of the Internet,” Mr. Buckley added, “this man was the bridge that assured that Osama bin Laden’s murderous message could cross the globe and enter American homes.”
Among the journalists who interviewed Bin Laden with Mr. Fawwaz’s assistance in 1997 and 1998 were Peter Arnett of CNN and John Miller of ABC News. Mr. Arnett and Mr. Miller, who is now the New York Police Department’s deputy commissioner of intelligence and counterterrorism, testified during the five-week trial.
Mr. Fawwaz, 52, was convicted on four conspiracy counts, and could face up to life in prison on each when he is sentenced by Judge Lewis A. Kaplan.
The verdict, coming less than a year after two other prominent terrorists — Sulaiman Abu Ghaith, a Bin Laden son-in-law, and Abu Hamza al-Masri, an Egyptian cleric — were convicted and given life sentences, seems likely to bolster the Obama administration’s stance that international terrorism cases can be safely tried in the nation’s civilian courts.
All three men received “full justice in a Manhattan courtroom,” said Preet Bharara, the United States attorney for the Southern District of New York.
“We hope this verdict gives some comfort to Al Qaeda’s victims around the world,” Mr. Bharara continued.
Bobbie C. Sternheim, a lawyer for Mr. Fawwaz, said the case would be appealed. “Trying a pre-9/11 terrorism case in the post-9/11 era within blocks of the World Trade Center site ensured that Khaled al-Fawwaz could never receive a truly fair trial by a truly impartial jury,” she said.
Mr. Fawwaz was arrested in Britain after the embassy attacks in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, on Aug. 7, 1998, which killed 224 people and wounded thousands. After a long extradition fight, he was sent to the United States in 2012 to face trial.
The defense portrayed him as a Saudi dissident who knew Bin Laden but had strongly rejected his violent tactics and who advocated for “peaceful reform.”
“It is very clear that Osama bin Laden took a very bad turn, and the turn that he took shocked, disturbed and angered Khaled al-Fawwaz,” Ms. Sternheim argued. She said the case was built on “suspicion, association, theory and inference.”
Prosecutors did not accuse Mr. Fawwaz of a direct role in planning or carrying out the bombings, but rather of participating in a conspiracy that included the attacks.
“I found myself buried under the debris,” recalled one of the victims who testified, George Mimba, a Kenyan who worked at the embassy in Nairobi and escaped by throwing himself through a second-floor window after the blast. He was rendered unconscious, he said, and when he awoke, “all I could see was shattered buildings, burning vehicles, people lying on the ground.”
One piece of telling evidence introduced by the government was a handwritten Qaeda membership list that United States forces recovered in Afghanistan in December 2001. Bin Laden was listed first, Mr. Atef was No. 3 and Mr. Fawwaz was No. 9, prosecutors said.
Ms. Sternheim told the jury that the government had “exaggerated” the list’s importance, but another prosecutor, Stephen J. Ritchin, said evidence and testimony confirmed its significance.
“The defendant’s name is not on this list by accident,” Mr. Ritchin said."
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