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Juror regrets guilty vote on Pak-American |
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 NJ, MAY 1 - With no direct evidence, federal prosecutors
convinced the jury last week that Hamid Hayat, 23, a
Pakistani-American `had a jihadi heart and a jihadi mind.'
In his closing comments to the jury,
Assistant U.S. Atty. Robert Tice-Raskin summed it up: "Hamid
Hayat had a jihadi heart and a jihadi mind."
That was the clincher for the jury, which found him guilty
of one count of providing material support to terrorists and
three counts of lying to federal agents. He now faces up to
39 years in prison.
Meanwhile, a Sacramento juror who voted to convict him on
federal terrorism charges says other jurors pressured her to
vote guilty.
In a sworn affidavit filed in the Federal District Court in
Sacramento, Arcelia Lopez said she had been bullied into
finding Hamid Hayat, 23, of Lodi, Calif., guilty on four
criminal charges -- one count of providing material support
to a terrorist group by attending a training camp in
Pakistan, and three counts of lying to federal agents.
Lopez said several jurors had decided Hayat was guilty even
before hearing the evidence. Lopez
said she was bullied into going along with other jurors,
particularly by Cote, who she claimed had a hangman's
mentality. "I deeply regret my decision," Lopez said.
Hayat's lawyer, Wazhma Mojaddidi, filed a motion for a new
trial immediately after obtaining the affidavit.
"I believe there was jury misconduct that compromised my
client's right to a fair and impartial trial," Mojaddidi
said.
U.S. Attorney McGregor W. Scott, the prosecutor in charge of
the case, issued a statement saying that Lopez's affidavit
would not alter the guilty verdict.
Hamid Hayat faces a minimum of 30 years in prison when he is
sentenced. But his father Umer Hayat who was charged
with lying to FBI agents about whether his son attended a
terrorist training camp in Pakistan, was conditionally
released by court when the
jury of eight women and four men, which deliberated nearly
eight days, could not reach a verdict in his case. The
federal judge declared a mistrial thereafter.
It was a case that roiled a small community of 2,500
Pakistani Americans in Sacramento, California. Taj Khan, a
community leader, said most of the Pakistani-Americans feel
the father and son were innocent in the case that federal
agents initially presented as a terrorist sleeper cell
operating in California's agricultural heartland.
The Lodi case was recently cited by U.S. intelligence chief
John D. Negroponte as an example of a "home-grown jihadist
cell."
The proof of Hayat's views were a
teenage scrapbook, a slip of paper inscribed with a
warrior's prayer in Arabic, books about jihadi martyrs, and
Hayat's own boastful comments secretly recorded by a man he
thought was his best friend but who turned out to be a paid
FBI informant.
After they established Hayat's mind-set, the prosecutors
were able to overcome key obstacles: the flawed confession
and nagging credibility issues with the informant. The
informant's unsubstantiated claim that he had seen Osama bin
Laden's top deputy in Lodi was used repeatedly to undermine
him during the nine-week trial.
Jury foreman Joe Cote, a 64-year-old retired salesman from
Folsom, Calif., called Hamid Hayat's activities and
utterances "un-Americanism".
Cote said the Arabic prayer Hayat carried in his wallet,
translated by a government expert as "Oh Allah, we place you
at their throats, and we seek refuge in you from their
evil," was especially influential with jurors.
"It carried a lot of weight," Cote said. "A supplication is
only carried in the country of the enemy. He would never
carry it in Pakistan. Even though he's an American citizen,
his love and his home are in Pakistan."
A juror's change of mind, sometimes described as "buyer's
remorse," is not usually enough to overturn a conviction.
But defense attorney Wazhma Mojaddidi said that Lopez faced
undue pressure and that Hayat deserves a new trial.
During the trial, no evidence was introduced suggesting that
Hayat was poised to commit a terrorist act. The facts seemed
to point in the opposite direction.
His father, mother, younger brother and a sister were all
back in the United States after a two-year sojourn in
Pakistan. Hayat had recently married and talked hopefully
about bringing his new bride to Lodi, the Central Valley
town where he had found a job in a cherry-packing plant.
Asked during his interrogation how he would receive orders
to attack, Hayat, a junior high school dropout whose
understanding of English is limited, answered hesitatingly:
"Maybe, uh, send a letter or anything like that, maybe."
 But McGregor Scott, U.S. attorney for the Eastern District
of California, said in an interview Friday that the case
against Hayat was short on the standard elements of proof
because the crime had not yet happened.
"In the post-9/11 context," Scott said, "law enforcement has
been given a mission by the president and the attorney
general to prevent deadly acts before they occur. That is
the new paradigm for law enforcement."
To some, that paradigm is evocative of the plot in the
Steven Spielberg-Tom Cruise movie "Minority Report," based
on the Philip K. Dick short story, in which thought police
are deployed to arrest potential criminals before they
commit crimes.
But Scott cautioned against the analogy. "We are not
prosecuting Hamid Hayat for what he said or what he
thought," Scott said. "We prosecuted him for the overt
physical act of attending a training camp and returning to
commit jihad. The difference is that you have a crime, but
you don't have a deadly crime."
The significance of the notebook and the prayer Hayat
carried in his wallet, Scott said, was "to show his
mind-set, his beliefs and therein, his intent."
The jury bought Scott's theory. "He very easily would have
done harm to somebody if he had continued down that path,"
Scaccia said.
The arrests of Hayat; his father, Lodi ice-cream truck
driver Umer Hayat; and Lodi's two Pakistani imams last June
were the first fruit of a terrorism deterrence program that
began several years ago after a U.S.-led invasion destroyed
Al Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan.
Law enforcement and intelligence officials in Washington
said terrorist training then shifted to three banned
militant Pakistani political groups: Hakat-ul-Mujahedin,
Jaish-e-Mohammed and Lashkar-e-Taiba. The three had close
ties to the Taliban in Afghanistan and, with tacit approval
of the Pakistani government, conducted terrorist activities
against India in disputed Kashmir.
The government knew that among those attending madrasas —
religious schools — affiliated with the banned groups were
Pakistani Americans such as Hayat, whose parents sent them
to their homeland for religious education. After Sept. 11,
2001, the U.S. government launched a program to identify and
investigate these Americans.
Hamid Hayat, who was born in Stockton but spent half his
life in Pakistan, was the first to be arrested. Earlier this
month, a Pakistani American and a Bangladeshi were arrested
in Atlanta and charged with the same crime: providing
material support for terrorism by attending a training camp
in Pakistan.
One of the banned groups featured in the Hayat case — Jaish-e-Mohammed
— was headed by firebrand author Masood Azhar, whose popular
books "Virtues of Jihad" and "Windows from the Prison" were
found among Hayat's possessions.
A government expert testified that a Jaish-e-Mohammed
training camp was located near Balakot, a city about five
hours north of Islamabad, Pakistan's capital. The camp
operated at the time Hayat said he trained in the area for
three to six months in 2003 and 2004.
To prove that Hayat provided material support for
terrorists, the government had to show that he attended a
terrorist training camp, received weapons or physical
training that could be used for terrorism, and returned with
the intent to commit violence against his fellow citizens.
The government did its most thorough job on the first of the
three tests.
During his long interrogation at the FBI office in
Sacramento, Hayat, fatigued and wrapped in a blanket, gave
six different locations for the training camp he attended.
Besides Balakot, they included two sites in Afghanistan; one
in Kashmir; one near his family home in Behboodi, Pakistan;
and another near Islamabad.
In a separate interrogation, his father, Umer Hayat, named a
camp in Rawalpindi, home of the Pakistani military command,
as the one his son attended. Umer Hayat said the driver of
his father-in-law, a politician who runs a large madrasa in
Rawalpindi, chauffeured him to that camp.
 In some of the most bizarre testimony of the trial, the
father said the training, including firearms practice, took
place in an enormous, deep basement where trainees masked
like "Ninja turtles" practiced pole-vaults and executions
with scimitars.
But because the father and son had separate juries, none of
this was heard by Hamid Hayat's jurors. As a result, the
government was able to try the two men using different
locations for the alleged terrorist camp. Umer Hayat's case,
in which he was charged with lying to federal agents, ended
in a mistrial.
In its original affidavit, the government listed the camp
attended by Hamid Hayat as the one near Rawalpindi. But the
camp about which Hamid Hayat gave the most information
during his interrogation was the one near Balakot. It is
also the one that best fit the government's theory.
It all came together for the prosecution during the
testimony of Pentagon satellite image expert Eric Benn. In a
skillful presentation, prosecutor David Deitch led Benn
through questioning that included maps, satellite
photographs and — on a screen that dropped down in the
half-darkened courtroom — outtakes from the FBI videotape in
which Hayat recalled how he got to the Balakot camp.
To the jurors, Deitch had presented a convincing case that
Hayat had actually been to a facility of some kind near
Balakot. Benn testified that based on satellite images and
Hayat's description, he was 60% to 70% sure it was a
"militant training" camp. This seriously undercut Hayat's
main defense that he had never attended a training camp and
that the comments he made during interrogation were lies
intended to tell the agents what they wanted to hear.
In the hours of secretly recorded conversations with
informant Naseem Khan, who was paid $230,000 to spy on Lodi
Muslims, Hayat always sounded reluctant and wary when
training was brought up. Khan called him a coward. Even his
father described him as extremely lazy.
As for what type exactly the Balakot camp was, what Hayat
did there and what he was supposed to do in the way of jihad
after his return, the government case was not nearly as
strong.
But the defense, locked into the position that Hayat didn't
go at all, did not attack the government case where it
appeared most vulnerable.
To describe the camp, the government introduced a former
Pakistani police chief, Hassan Abbas, who said he had heard
of a camp near Balakot that was affiliated with Jaish-e-Mohammed
and Azhar, the jihadi author whose books were found in
Hayat's garage apartment.
A defense expert on Pakistan, University of Oregon professor
Anita Weiss, testified that there were many religious camps
in Pakistan that had nothing to do with terrorism but were
more like Baptist summer camps in the United States.
Jurors believed Abbas.
The government did not probe much into the training Hayat
received for his mission.
Hayat, who appears painfully frail, said he fired a pistol
three times but that he found it very heavy and never
learned to reload it. He also said he fired a big shotgun
once, but the recoil was so powerful that instructors told
him not to do it again.
"And, you know, I was thanking God for that. I don't want to
do that again," he said.
Hayat said he spent most of his time washing vegetables. He
mentioned onions.
 As for his mission, Hayat was vague about what he would be
asked to do. He said he wasn't sure who would give him the
orders, but it might be one of two Lodi Imams.
Asked about targets, Hayat appeared clueless:
"You mean like buildings?"
"Yeah, buildings," the FBI agent said.
"Where?" Hayat asked.
"Sacramento or San Francisco?" the agent asked.
"I'll say Los Angeles and San Francisco," Hayat responded.
"Financial, commercial?" the agent asked.
"I'll say finance and things like that," Hayat said.
"Hospitals?" the agent suggested.
"Maybe, I'm sure. Stores," Hayat said.
"What kind of stores?" the agent asked.
"Food stores."
It was this exchange that the government cited when it
announced the arrests of the Hayats last June.
"Hamid advised that he specifically requested to come to the
United States to carry out his jihadi mission," the
affidavit said. "Potential targets for attack would include
hospitals and large food stores."
The affidavit was later withdrawn. |
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Pak-American
Umer Hayat freed on bail |
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NJ,
MAY 1 - Umer Hayat, whose son Hamid was convicted of
supporting terrorism by attending an al-Qaida camp in
Pakistan was released Monday after nearly a year in federal
custody. Hayat, a 48-year-old ice cream vendor, had been
held since he and his son were arrested last June.
Umer Hayat was charged with two counts of lying to the
FBI about his son's attendance at the training camp, but his
case ended in a mistrial last week after the jury of eight
women and four men said it was deadlocked.
Federal prosecutors must decide by Friday if they will
seek a new trial.
Last week, a U.S. District Court judge lowered Umer
Hayat's bail from $1.2 million to $390,000, paving the way
for his release.
He stood silent by attorney's side and made no comments
after his release Monday.
Hayat learned that his father died over the weekend. "It's a
bittersweet moment right now," Hayat's attorney Griffin
said. "His father tried to hang on."
Umer Hayat will be confined to his home in the
California's agricultural town of Lodi and was fitted with
an electronic monitoring device.
Umer and son Hamid were charged after having given
videotaped confessions to FBI agents that were played to
jurors. Defense lawyers said their clients gave the
confessions after they were worn down by hours of
questioning and were merely responding to leading questions
by FBI agents. |
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Mistrial Declared
in Pakistani-American Case |
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 NJ,
APRIL 25 - A federal judge today declared a mistrial in the terrorism case
against a Lodi ice cream truck driver, who was charged with lying to FBI agents
about whether his son attended a terrorist training camp in Pakistan.
The jury of eight women and four men, which deliberated nearly eight days, could
not reach a verdict in Umer Hayat's case, a Pakistani-American.
After deliberating a little more than an hour today, the Umer Hayat jury sent a
note to U.S. District Judge Garland E. Burrell stating they were "decisively
deadlocked."
Defense attorney Johnny L. Griffin said he was "very pleased that the jury did
not find our client guilty. Our position from day one was that Umer Hayat was
not a terrorist."
He also told reporters that his impression was that the jury was evenly split.
It was a case that roiled this small community with its 2,500 Pakistani
Americans. Taj Khan, a community leader, said most of the Pakistani-Americans
feel the father and son were innocent in the case that federal agents initially
presented as a terrorist sleeper cell operating in California's agricultural
heartland.
The Lodi case was recently cited by U.S. intelligence chief John D. Negroponte
as an example of a "home-grown jihadist cell."
The jury for the son, Hamid Hayat, meanwhile continued its deliberations.
Hamid, 23, is charged with providing material support to terrorists by attending
a training camp in Pakistan in 2003. He is also charged with lying to federal
agents when they interrogated him. |
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