U.S.

2nd Embassy Bomber Spared Death

By CBSNews.com staff CBSNews.com staff

July 10, 2001 / 12:18 PM EDT / CBS

A New York jury decided Tuesday that a Tanzanian man convicted in the 1998 bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, will be sentenced to life in prison for the attack that killed 11 people.

In its third day of deliberations, the 12 anonymous jurors said they could not agree on the death penalty for Khalfan Khamis Mohamed.

Mohamed, 27, was convicted in May of mass murder for the bombing in his native Tanzania. He told FBI agents after his arrest that he had no regrets about the terrorist attack.

The decision concluded a six-month prosecution resulting in convictions against four men involved in the simultaneous bombings of U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya — part of an alleged plot by Osama bin Laden, the fugitive Saudi millionaire, to kill Americans worldwide.

The defendant "has ice in his veins," prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald said during the death penalty proceedings in U.S. District Court in Manhattan.

The same jury had deadlocked on the death penalty earlier, sparing the life of Mohamed Rashed Daoud Al-'Owhali, 24, of Saudi Arabia. He was convicted of killing 213 people in the Kenyan blast.

The jurors, after five days of deliberations, reached that conclusion on June 12. Afterward, 10 jurors said they thought executing Al-'Owhali might make him a martyr — a point seized on by Mohamed's attorney during the death penalty phase.

"Send him to jail and he'll be quickly forgotten," said defense lawyer David Stern. "Kill him, and you guarantee him immortality."

After building the Al-'Owhali death case almost entirely on the emotional testimony of victims of the Kenya bombing, prosecutors took a different approach for Mohamed. They focused on a savage attack last year against a prison guard as the defendants awaited trial.

Mohamed was accused of helping his cellmate ambush guard Louis Pepe in a botched escape scheme. Jurors heard other guards describe the horror of seeing a sharpened comb plunged into the victim's left eye.

Prosecutors argued that the attack, which left Pepe with permanent brain damage, proved Mohamed was a chronic threat who would try to kill again behind bars. Even the Florence, Colo., prison reserved for the worst federal offenders — the so-called "Alcatraz of the Rockies" — was not secure enough to hold him, they said.

"A life sentence for Khalfan Mohamed is a death sentence for the next guard who makes a mistake," prosecutor Michael Garcia said.

The defense contended Mohamed was an unwitting bystander to his cellmate's breakout attempt, and that he was the victim of retaliation by guards who broke his nose and eye socket.

Friends and family of Mohamed took the witness stand to describe his childhood on Pemba, a tiny, impoverished island in the Zanzibar archipelago where his father died when he was 7.

They described a devout Muslim who prayed five times a day and taught the Quran to children. The defendant wept when his mother told jurors she would sufer if he was sentenced to death.

The two remaining defendants in the current case — Wadih El-Hage, 40, a Lebanese-born U.S. citizen from Arlington, Texas, and Mohamed Sadeek Odeh, 36, of Jordan — were convicted of conspiracy and face automatic life sentences.

All four were convicted by the same jury on May 29.