Federal prosecutors yesterday told a New York court that Trinidadian Kareem Ibrahim took part in a foiled plot to blow up New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport by offering to find people who might fund it.
According to a Bloomberg report Ibrahim, 65, in May 2007 advised the plotters not to seek help from an extremist group in Trinidad and instead offered to find other backers, according to the June 2007 criminal complaint under which he was arrested.
“Without any hesitation, Ibrahim joined the plot,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Berit Berger told jurors on Tuesday in the Brooklyn, New York court.
“Ibrahim volunteered to contact people overseas” in England and Iran she continued.
U.S. District Judge Dora Irizarry is presiding over the trial.
The attacks, hatched by a former cargo worker at the airport, Russell Defreitas, a Guyanese by birth with US citizenship, were designed to blow up fuel lines and tanks and, ultimately, “the whole of Kennedy,” Defreitas had said in a recorded conversation. The plot surrounding the Queens, New York, airport was foiled in its planning stages with the aid of informant Steven Francis, who infiltrated the group.
Defreitas, 67, and former PNCR parliamentarian and Linden mayor Abdul Kadir, 59, have both been sentenced to life in prison after a jury convicted them in August last year Another Guyanese, Abdel Nur, 61, pleaded guilty on the eve of last year’s trial and was sentenced to 15 years.
“Mr. Ibrahim is innocent,” his lawyer, Zoe J. Dolan, told the jury in her opening statement yesterday.
The plot members sought support from Abu Bakr, leader of the group Jamaat Al Muslimeen, or JAM, which had staged a 1990 coup attempt in Trinidad, according to court papers.
Bloomberg reported that Berger told the jury the JFK plotters hoped to get help either from JAM directly or by JAM introducing them to Adnan G. El Shukrijumah.
Shukrijumah, a man of Guyanese parentage, is wanted in connection with possible terrorist threats against the U.S. and is a member of al-Qaeda, the Muslim terrorist group formerly led by Osama bin Laden, according to court papers. Last year he was named operational commander of the group and it is feared with the death of bin Laden he is one that could take up over the leadership of the terrorist group.
Ibrahim, who was slated to be tried last year with the others, was granted a separate trial due to a medical condition.
