MIAMI — In more than 100 wiretapped phone calls played this week in the terrorism case against Jose Padilla, jurors learned how the Muslim convert was recruited by a South Florida man, sent to Egypt to study Arabic and the Koran, and disappeared off his mentor's radar within two years.
Padilla's voice is heard in only seven of the calls played for the jury, culled from 14,000 "pertinent recordings" made by U.S. intelligence agents during the decade they had the alleged ringmasters of a North American terrorism support cell under surveillance.
Most of the audiotapes presented in the fifth week of the trial involve Padilla's alleged recruiter, Adham Amin Hassoun, a Lebanese-born Palestinian who has lived in Sunrise, Fla., since 1989. A frequent speaker at the Sunrise mosque, Hassoun was apparently placed under clandestine surveillance in 1993 after saying the alleged mastermind of that year's World Trade Center bombing was a victim of injustice in the U.S.
Hassoun implored Muslims at mosques in South Florida to donate money or join forces in aid of beleaguered Muslims in Bosnia, Kosovo, Chechnya and Somalia, according to the audiotapes and witness testimony.
Under Hassoun's guidance, Padilla left for Egypt in September 1998; Hassoun's last contact with him was in spring 2000.
How and where Padilla was allegedly trained for waging jihad and whether that preparation involved taking up arms under the direction of Al Qaeda remained unclear after the prosecution played most of the 123 taped conversations it plans to introduce between Hassoun and a handful of other alleged recruits in Egypt, Kosovo and former Soviet republics near Russia's restive Chechnya region.
The trial on charges of material support to terrorists and conspiracy to harm innocents abroad is a far cry from the government's original accusations against Padilla at the time of his arrest in May 2002.
After Padilla was detained at Chicago's O'Hare International Airport on a material witness warrant, then-Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft announced in a satellite TV appearance from Moscow that Padilla had been plotting to detonate a radioactive dirty bomb in a U.S. city.
The dirty-bomb claim reportedly stemmed from confessions of captured Al Qaeda lieutenant Abu Zubaydah, who was being interrogated at a secret CIA "black site" in the weeks before Padilla's arrest. Zubaydah, now held at Guantanamo Bay, has since claimed he made false confessions under CIA torture.
