The last defendant in the 2007 JFK Airport terror plot which snared three Guyanese was yesterday sentenced in a New York court to life imprisonment.
Bloomberg reported that Trinidadian Kareem Ibrahim, 66, was sentenced to life by US District Court Judge Dora Irizarry in Brooklyn, New York. He was convicted in May last year. US prosecutors had accused him of joining a plan in May, 2007 to target the JFK airport.
“There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that he agreed to enter this plot,” the judge was quoted by Bloomberg as saying.
The terror plan which was crafted by Guyanese Russell DeFreitas was designed to blow up fuel lines and tanks. DeFreitas and former PNCR MP Abdul Kadir were sentenced to life imprisonment in the matter and another Guyanese Abdul Nur was jailed for 15 years.
Ibrahim, who was slated to be tried with the others, was granted a separate proceeding due to a medical condition. He had asked for a sentence of 11 years and three months.
One of his lawyers, Zoe Dolan, indicated after the ruling that they would appeal the decision. “I fundamentally disagree with the sentence that’s been imposed and we will appeal,” Dolan said.
The JFK plot was foiled in its planning stages with the aid of a government informant who infiltrated the group and recorded its conversations.
“I just went along and hoped it would fizzle out,” Ibrahim, however, testified at his trial last year. “It wasn’t my intention to further the plot.”
Michael Hueston, another of Ibrahim’s lawyers, told Irizarry yesterday that the JFK plan in a sense wasn’t real.
“This talk, this conspiracy — it wasn’t materializing,” Hueston said in arguing for a lower sentence.
However, Assistant U.S. Attorney Marshall Miller disagreed. “They reached out not to one, not to two, but to at least three seasoned terrorist organizations,” Miller told the judge.
Ibrahim convinced the JFK plotters to approach revolutionary leaders in Iran instead of using Jamaat Al Muslimeen, a group that staged a 1990 coup attempt in Trinidad that resulted in two dozen deaths, because its leader had recently been criminally charged in Trinidad, according to prosecutors.
