Conspiracy

The controversial terrorism prosecution of six South Florida men again ended in uncertainty Wednesday after the second jury selected to hear the case became so divided over the evidence that it could not agree on any verdicts. Weary prosecutors gave no immediate indication whether the government would try the case a third time.

A man who planned attacks on military installations and synagogues in the Los Angeles area for an Islamic terrorist cell was sentenced Monday to 22 years in federal prison for conspiring to wage war against the United States. Levar Haney Washington told a federal judge in Santa Ana that cell members "flirted with the possibility" of attacking targets but no longer believe "a military solution is possible" because "it belies reality."

Afghanistan's intelligence service said Saturday that it had broken up a Taliban plot to attack the country's most notorious prison with a wave of suicide bombers, while the government named a new interior minister to lead the country's fledgling police. The militants planned to attack the Policharki prison on the outskirts of the capital, Kabul, to free Taliban and criminal prisoners, the Afghan intelligence service said.

Six men plotted to kill subway and bus passengers with bombs made from hydrogen peroxide and flour, two weeks after suicide bombers killed 52 commuters here, a British prosecutor told a jury Monday. No one was killed in the attempted bombings of three subway trains and a bus on July 21, 2005, because the devices failed to explode. "We say that the failure of these bombs to explode owed nothing to the intentions of the defendants.

Former Cendant Corp. Chairman Walter Forbes was sentenced Wednesday to 12 years and seven months in prison and ordered to pay $3.275 billion in restitution for leading the largest accounting fraud of the 1990s. In October, a jury found Forbes guilty of conspiracy to commit securities fraud and two counts of making false statements in a massive fraud scheme that cost the travel and real estate company and its investors more than $3 billion.

Al Qaeda's Iraq-based faction considered trying to use student visas to get a dozen or more operatives into the United States to launch an attack, a ploy that was successful for one of the hijackers in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, U.S. counter-terrorism officials confirmed Monday.

British police arrested nine suspects Wednesday in a possible Iraq-style plot to kidnap and behead a British Muslim soldier and broadcast his death on the Internet. Authorities raided an Islamic bookshop, a small market and at least 10 other sites in several neighborhoods in the central English city of Birmingham, cordoning off streets and launching a search that was expected to last several days.

In the wake of a secretive anti-terrorism operation in Birmingham, British authorities provided a first look Friday at accusations against six men charged in connection with an alleged Iraq-style plot to kidnap and kill a British Muslim soldier. Prosecutors charged Parviz Khan, 36, with several terrorism offenses related "to his intention to kidnap and kill a member of the British armed forces."

In his opening statement three weeks ago in the federal perjury trial of I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, defense lawyer Theodore V. Wells Jr. dropped a bombshell. In dramatic tones, Wells declared that Libby had been the victim of a White House conspiracy to make Libby the fall guy for the CIA leak scandal. But when the jury begins deliberating the fate of the former vice presidential aide next week, it will have seen virtually no evidence to back up the provocative claim.

Four men pleaded guilty Wednesday to conspiring with an Al Qaeda-linked operative convicted of plotting to bomb the New York Stock Exchange and other targets in the United States and Britain. The men pleaded guilty in a London court to plotting to cause explosions with Dhiren Barot, who was sentenced to life in prison in November for planning attacks on several U.S. financial targets, London hotels and train stations.