Lawyers for Osama bin Laden’s son-in-law, Sulaiman Abu Ghaith, said Thursday they now expect to use a long, written questionnaire to interview alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed as a witness before Abu Ghaith’s Feb. 24 Manhattan federal court terror trial.
The lawyers had sought a court order requiring the Pentagon to grant them access to Guantanamo Bay to interview Mohammed in person, but reached a compromise with prosecutors, who vehemently opposed that request unless the feds could sit in the on the interview.
In legal filings last week, Abu Ghaith’s lawyer, Stanley Cohen, said getting access to Mohammed is crucial for Abu Ghaith’s defense since Mohammed is widely credited with commissioning “shoe bomber” Richard Reid’s failed bid to blow up an airliner two months after 9/11 — and the government alleges Abu Ghaith played a key role in that terror plot.
During a court hearing Thursday, Cohen said he expects Mohammed to agree to answer hundreds of potential questions through the questionnaire. The move to bring in Mohammed in as witness was in response to the feds’ plan to have Saajid Muhammad Badat testify at trial via closed-circuit TV from the United Kingdom.
The star witness, who is free in the UK after cutting a deal with British authorities, had a last-minute change of heart and pulled out of Reid’s botched terror plot aboard American Airlines Flight 63 from Paris to Miami on Dec. 22, 2001.
Prosecutors expect him to testify that Abu Ghaith knowingly took part in al-Qaida’s conspiracy to kill Americans, including the shoe-bomb plot, and visited the al-Qaida camp Matar, which provided training in “urban warfare.”
Judge Lewis Kaplan on Thursday shot down a request by prosecutors to have Badat testify anonymously by a using a pseudonym.
The feds also expect Badat to testify via closed-circuit TV in April at the Manhattan federal trial of handless hate preacher Abu Hamza al-Masri.