Texas Man Convicted of Helping Attack U.S. Army Base in Afghanistan
In January 2009, two trucks packed with explosives careened toward the front gate of a remote United States Army base in the Khost Province of Afghanistan.
The first truck exploded near the gate, injuring a pregnant Afghan woman and several others. But the terrorist plot to kill American soldiers was foiled when the second truck crashed into the blast crater left by the initial explosion.
On Friday, a Texas-born man, Muhanad Mahmoud Al Farekh, was convicted of having helped to plan the attack as an operative of Al Qaeda.
After a weeklong trial in Federal District Court in Brooklyn, Mr Farekh was found guilty on charges of providing material aid to terrorists.
Born in Houston and raised in Dubai, Mr Farekh, 31, served in Al Qaeda's external operations unit from 2007 to 2014, prosecutors said, where his duties included collecting money for the terrorist group's fighters.
When he was first identified as a Qaeda operative, his case prompted a debate within the U.S. government over whether it was morally and legally defensible to kill an American citizen overseas without a trial.
Although the Pentagon nominated Mr Farekh to be placed on the so-called kill list of terrorism suspects and the Central Intelligence Agency pushed for him to be killed, he was taken into custody in Pakistan in 2014 based on intelligence provided by American officials.
After being questioned by a team of elite terrorism investigators, he was eventually brought to Brooklyn to stand trial.
At the trial, prosecutors described how Mr Farekh had studied at the University of Manitoba in Western Canada and was radicalized in part by the online sermons of Anwar al-Awlaki, an American-born Islamic cleric who was killed by the C.I.A.
in Yemen in 2011. Prosecutors said that Mr Farekh and two friends, Ferid Imam and Maiwand Yar, traveled to Pakistan in 2007.
There, they said, Mr Farekh joined Al Qaeda, working his way up the ranks, his ascent assisted by marrying the daughter of a top Qaeda leader. After an attack at Forward Operating Base Chapman on Jan.
19, 2009, forensic technicians were able to recover latent fingerprints from the adhesive packing tape used to bind together the explosive material in the second undetonated bomb, prosecutors said. At least 12 of those prints, they said, matched Mr Farekh's.
Starting in 2012, the Obama administration began a series of discussions about Mr Farekh's fate.
Though American drones had shown him several times in Pakistan in the early months of 2013 and spy agencies were monitoring his communications, the decision eventually was made to spare his life.
Among the witnesses who testified against Mr Farekh was Zarein Ahmedzay who said that while they were in the tribal areas of Pakistan, he had taught Mr Farekh how to handle weapons, like pistols, machine guns and hand grenades.
Mr Ahmedzay took the stand against Mr Farekh under a cooperation agreement with the government reached after he pleaded guilty in 2010 to planning an attack on the New York City subway system.
Mr Farekh will face up to life in prison at his sentencing scheduled for Jan.
Correction: September 29, 2017 An earlier version of this article misstated the status of a pregnant woman who was hit when a truck exploded near a United States Army base in Afghanistan. She was injured, not killed.
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