NEW YORK — In an emotion-charged courtroom not far from the wreckage of the World Trade Center, a federal judge Thursday sentenced four followers of Islamic militant Osama bin Laden to life in prison in the bombing of two U.S. embassies in East Africa that killed 224 people.
The almost simultaneous attacks in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, on Aug. 7, 1998, were part of what prosecutors said was a worldwide plot to murder Americans wherever they could be found.
Eighteen others have been indicted in the continuing investigation, including Bin Laden and a dozen more fugitives.
U.S. marshals carrying shotguns and automatic weapons ringed the courthouse in lower Manhattan during the proceedings, which carried additional emotional impact in the wake of the Sept. 11 destruction of the trade center--an attack that the United States asserts was also orchestrated by Bin Laden.
"I lost my wife, the love of my life and the mother of my daughters," Howard Kavaler, who was a foreign service officer in Nairobi, told the court. "The clouds of dust, the dangling wires, the muffled cries for help are still in my mind. The carnage of Sept. 11 has only exacerbated those memories."
Judge Leonard B. Sand imposed identical sentences for Khalfan Khamis Mohamed, a 28-year-old Tanzanian; Mohamed Rashed Daoud al-'Owhali, 24, of Saudi Arabia; Wadih El-Hage, 41, a naturalized U.S. citizen born in Lebanon who lived in Arlington, Texas, and Mohamed Sadeek Odeh, 36, a citizen of Jordan.
Sand also ordered each of the men to pay $33 million in restitution, perhaps, he suggested, out of terrorist assets frozen by the Bush administration after the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
U.S. Atty. Mary Jo White, whose office prosecuted the case, called the sentences "lines in the sand in the fight against terrorism."
The sentences of life in prison without parole were expected after the jury declined to impose the death penalty on two of the defendants. Jurors said execution could make them martyrs, or that a lethal injection was too humane a way for them to die for their crimes.
Addressing the court through an interpreter, Odeh condemned missile strikes ordered by President Clinton in response to the embassy bombings. He claimed that "dozens of civilians" who were killed or injured by the missile attacks in Afghanistan have "nobody here [in court] to represent them at this time."
