Free Republic

BERLIN- A Syrian-born businessman who knew Sept. 11 ringleader Mohamed Atta and has been accused of operating an al-Qaida front lashed out at President Bush on Thursday and denied any connection to terrorism. Mamoun Darkazanli, described by the FBI as a well-connected agent of Osama bin Laden, was questioned by German police shortly after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. But he was freed for lack of evidence and continues to live in Hamburg, Germany, where Atta and two other hijackers had lived. Speaking to The Associated Press in a telephone interview, Darkazanli bristled when...

The lawyer of an alleged top al-Qaida chief says his clients trial should be moved because so many New Yorkers say they were affected by the September 11th terrorist attacks, after his client protested the pain of his manacled wrists in court. U.S. District Judge Deborah Batts directed lawyers to submit written arguments about where the prison-stabbing trial should be held and other issues even as she set an April 10th trial date for Mamdouh Mahmud Salim (Mom-Doo-Mach-Mood-Sah-leem). Salim faces trial in the stabbing of a prison guard in the face while awaiting trial on an attempt to bomb two ...

President Obama finally listened to the outcry of New York, and is considering moving the trial of 9/11 terrorist Khalid Sheik Mohammed and other al Qaeda members out of the city, perhaps to Guantanamo Bay. Finally, some wisdom. It would be better there. It's military. They're not going to mess around. These dangerous terrorists will not be allowed to spread their hate, or hurt anyone else. Nobody knows better than me. I was a federal prison guard at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan. In 2000, I was with a prisoner, Mamdouh Mahmud Salim, taking him back to his cell....

Ten months before Al Qaeda in 2001 struck a deathblow in the heart lower Manhattan, one of the terrorist group's founding members plunged a sharpened comb through Pepe's left eye and into his brain, blinding the 42-year-old prison guard and causing severe brain injuries that plague him to this day. Pepe told FoxNews.com he worries that sending Mohammed and four of his alleged fellow 9/11 conspirators to New York could compromise the safety of the guards at the MCC prison. Keeping the prisoners in one location, he said, was especially dangerous. Teaming up against Pepe, they beat and blinded him,...

A top Osama Bin Laden lieutenant who stabbed a Manhattan prison guard in the eye said yesterday that his hand was covered in blood after the attack but denied it was an act of terror. "My hand was all bloody," Mamdouh Mahmud Salim said as he gave a judge a chilling blow-by-blow account of the Nov. 1, 2000, assault on Louis Pepe at the Metropolitan Correctional Center. "This is the first time in my life that the blood of another person would come on my hand." Prosecutors are trying to prove the stabbing with a sharpened comb was a terrorist...

Today the US Treasury designated three entities as financiers of terrorism under Executive Order 13224 and will ask the United Nations to add these names to the list of those whose assets must be blocked by all member nations under UNSCR 1390. The financial accounts of the principal entity, Benevolence International Foundation, were blocked pending investigation in December 2001. The three closely linked but separately incorporated entities designated today are Benevolence International Foundation, Benevolence International Fund (Canada), Bosanska Idealna Futura (Bosnia), and their branch offices. “UN designation of these financiers of terror will cut off their access to the global...