– Jurors to begin deliberating after hearing closings arguments
NEW YORK – The jury hearing the trial of two accused men in a terrorist plot are expected to begin their deliberations today.
Yesterday,  the jury heard closing statements from both the prosecution and the defence, with the prosecution maintaining their claim  that the men had hoped to cause a spectacular explosion that would kill thousands at New York’s Kennedy International Airport and avenge U.S. oppression of Muslims. The defendants wanted to blow up jet fuel tanks at the sprawling airport, causing an explosion “so massive … that it could be seen from far, far away,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Zainab Ahmad said in closing arguments in federal court in Brooklyn, according to a Sacramento Bee report.
Their vision prompted them to code name the plot “The Shining Light,” the prosecutor said.
Russell Defreitas, 66, a former JFK cargo handler, and Abdul Kadir, 58, once a member of the Parliament in Guyana, were arrested in 2007 after an informant infiltrated the plot and made a series of secret recordings.
Prosecutors say Defreitas did reconnaissance on the airport, sought the help of a militant Muslim group in Trinidad along with Kadir and dreamt of delivering a devastating economic blow to the United States.
Defreitas, a naturalized U.S. citizen from Guyana, “is a classic homegrown extremist,” Ahmad said.
Defense attorneys have denied their clients are militants and claim they were framed by a shady informant.
At trial, the government’s evidence included tapes of Defreitas that showed he was determined to avenge the mistreatment of Muslims in the United States and abroad with an attack that would “dwarf 9/11,” Ahmad said yesterday.
He also told the informant that his U.S. citizenship gave him cover, the prosecutor added.
“They don’t expect nobody in this country to do something like this,” she quoted him as saying. “They have their eyes on foreigners, not me.”
As part of the plot, Defreitas and the informant traveled to Guyana to meet with Kadir and show him homemade surveillance videotapes of the airport’s so-called fuel farms, the prosecutor said. The plotters also discussed reaching out to Adnam Shukrijumah, an al-Qaida operative and explosives expert who was believed to be hiding out in the Caribbean at the time, she added.
Shukrijumah, an FBI-most wanted terrorist, was indicted in federal court in Brooklyn this month on charges he was involved in a failed plot to attack the New York City subway system with suicide bombers.
Defense attorney Mildred Whalen countered the prosecution’s claim by accusing a government informant of manipulating a ragtag crew of delusional dupes who had “seen too many Bruce Willis movies.”
She called her client Defreitas a “weak-minded, foolish man with a big mouth.”
Defreitas’ bragging about his inside knowledge of JFK “doesn’t mean he’s breaking the law,” his attorney said Monday. “He’s just acting like a fool.”
Kadir, took to the witness stand Wednesday last and denied allegations that he was a militant Muslim who spied for Iran years before joining a plot to blow up New York’s John F Kennedy International Airport.
And according to 9News report, he described himself as a devout Muslim who once served as mayor of his hometown, Linden, Guyana, and in the Guyanese parliament, but told jurors that he had sought to distance himself from his alleged co-conspirators once he learned they wanted to attack Kennedy Airport.
He claimed he warned them it was against their religion.
“Islam does not support aggression or killing innocent people,” he recalled saying to them.
Under cross-examination, prosecutors confronted Kadir with evidence he had drafted reports on Guyanese politics and economics in the 1980s and 1990s for an Iranian diplomat in Venezuela. One document referred to a plan to spread Islamic influence in Guyana.
Kadir admitted he had written the reports but denied involvement in espionage or radical causes.
Yesterday his attorney, Kafahni Nkrumah, argued that prosecutors had exaggerated the threat.
“Forget all the bogeyman stuff,” he said.
In a rebuttal argument, Assistant U.S. Attorney Marshall Miller said Defreitas was devious enough to imagine destruction on a grand scale – and smart enough to know he needed help from Kadir and others to pull it off.
“Many people who commit crimes aren’t rocket scientists,” he said.