NEW YORK, Jan 20: A New York college graduate, Adis Medujanin, who travelled to Pakistan in 2008 to apparently attend Al Qaeda training camp, conspired to kill American service members in Afghanistan, a US federal prosecutor told a Brooklyn court on Tuesday.
The prosecutor, Assistant United States Attorney James P. Loonam, told Judge Raymond J. Dearie that charges against Medujanin, 25, might be consolidated along with that of Najibullah Zazi, an Afghan man who was arrested earlier last year in a separate indictment alleging his involvement in an Al Qaeda bomb plot in New York City.
The case was unfolding in Brooklyn while in the Manhattan federal court the trial of Dr Aafia Siddiqui got under way amidst tight security.
Mr Medujanin was charged with conspiring to commit murder in a foreign country and receiving military-type training from Al Qaeda, said a report in the New York Times.
The two-page indictment had provided almost no details about the alleged conspiracy, and while Mr Loonam’s comments in the court were far from expansive, they constituted the most detailed description of it.
“In August 2008, the defendant travelled with others from the United States to Pakistan, with the intent of killing US service members in Afghanistan,” the attorney said.
Medujanin, who has been held without bail since his arraignment, sat quietly at the defence table beside his lawyer, Robert C. Gottlieb.
Gottlieb has complained that his client was kept incommunicado from his family and lawyer for more than 36 hours after he was taken into custody on Jan 7, and he contended that Mr Medujanin’s constitutional rights were violated.
Source: Pakistan Dawn
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