'Ft. Dix Six' informants in hot seat too

CHERRY HILL, N.J. — One is a bankrupt convicted felon who spewed venomous hatred about the United States, hooked up an alleged terrorist cell with semiautomatic weapons and drove the surveillance car as they cased military bases. The other boasted of killing someone back home in Albania and vowed to kill others or blow himself up in a crowd of people now that he was in the United States.

But Mahmoud Omar and Besnik Bakalli aren't members of the so-called "Ft. Dix Six," five of whom go on trial Monday for allegedly conspiring to gun down military personnel at the sprawling South Jersey base in a jihad-inspired attack last year. They're the FBI informants who are instrumental to the government's case against the group.

Information surfacing about the two men on the eve of one of the most high-profile U.S.-based terrorism trials since Sept. 11 all but guarantees that they will be put in the hot seat nearly as much as the defendants, along with their FBI handlers.

Omar, 39, is a fast-talking Egyptian who fixed and sold used cars out of his South Jersey apartment building parking lot. He was paid as much as $150,000 -- and possibly more -- by federal authorities for infiltrating a group of young, foreign-born Muslims in this prosperous Philadelphia suburb after authorities became suspicious of them in early 2006.

For 16 months, Omar talked tough, boasting of his exploits as an Egyptian military officer, a drug dealer and a petty criminal who sneaked into the United States through Mexico in the 1980s, according to wiretapped conversations as well as the brother of three of the defendants. That brother participated in some of the alleged activities in question but has been cleared of wrongdoing.

Bakalli, who is about 35, talked even tougher than Omar, bragging constantly about how he was not afraid to die. Previously known only as "confidential witness 2," Bakalli's name surfaced for the first time last week in court papers.

"Besnik was the only one talking about wanting to shoot people, to blow them up, and we kept saying, 'Why would you want to do that? It's forbidden in our religion,' " said Burim Duka, 17, an ethnic Albanian Muslim whose three brothers are among those on trial. "And he'd say, 'What are you so scared of?' "

Duka says the informants created the conspiracy out of nothing, fingering his brothers and two of his friends as participating in a terrorist plot when such a plot never existed.