Jurors found Osama Bin Laden’s son-in-law guilty Wednesday of providing support to terrorists and conspiring to kill Americans as an Al Qaeda spokesman around the time of the 9/11 attacks.
Sulaiman Abu Ghaith, 48, spewed hateful speeches alongside Bin Laden in several Al Qaeda propaganda videos filmed shortly after the attacks, including one made outside a mountain cave in Afghanistan on Sept. 12, 2001, the day after the Twin Towers fell.
It took the 12 jurors about a day to reach their verdict in Manhattan Federal Court and the defendant now faces a maximum sentence of life in prison.
Abu Ghaith, wearing a black suit and white dress shirt, sat silently and listened through earphones to an Arabic interpreter as his verdict was read by a clerk.
He appeared at ease and smiled ever-so-slightly as he was escorted out of the courtroom.
His sentencing is scheduled for Sept. 8. The jury of nine women and three men was anonymous, per a request from the feds and approved by the judge in the case.
“He was more than just Osama Bin Laden’s propaganda minister,” said Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara.
“Within hours after the devastating 9/11 attacks, Abu Ghaith was using his position in Al Qaeda’s homicidal hierarchy to persuade others to pledge themselves to Al Qaeda in the cause of murdering more Americans.”
Defense lawyers said they plan to appeal the case.
“He was stoic. He was at ease,” lawyer Stanley Cohen said of Abu Ghaith’s reaction to the verdict. “He has confidence that this is the beginning, not the end.”
The lawyer said the defense should have been allowed to introduce evidence about Abu Ghaith’s 11 years of “imprisonment and torture” in Iran prior to his capture last year by the U.S.
Prosecutors said the religious cleric from Kuwait helped Al Qaeda by speaking to fighters at training camps in Afghanistan before 9/11 and by serving as a mouthpiece for Bin Laden as the terrorist leader sought to recruit a new crop of suicide attackers.
“These young men who have destroyed the United States and launched the storm of airplanes against it have done a good deed,” said Abu Ghaith, the highest-ranked Al Qaeda figure to be tried on U.S. soil since 9/11.
“The storm of airplanes will not abate.”
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