Six men convicted in U.S. Embassy plot

PARIS – A French court on Tuesday convicted six French Algerian men of plotting to blow up the U.S. Embassy in Paris with a suicide bombing in the weeks before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the United States.

Djamel Beghal, 39, whom prosecutors called the ringleader, received the maximum sentence of 10 years in prison, and an accomplice, Kamel Daoudi, 30, an engineering and computer specialist who was considered the communications operative, received nine years. The four others received prison terms ranging from one to six years.

According to prosecutors, the attack was to be carried out by a Tunisian former professional soccer player, Nizar Trabelsi. A Belgian court sentenced Trabelsi to 10 years in prison in 2003 after he confessed to a plot to drive a car packed with explosives into a Belgian air base where U.S. nuclear missiles are believed to be stored. Trabelsi denied involvement in a planned Paris suicide attack.

Prosecutors offered few other details on how the ornate embassy in central Paris would have been targeted. They presented no evidence showing that the men had explosives or such things as maps of the embassy premises.

The six were all convicted of criminal association in relation with a terrorist enterprise, a broad charge that carries a maximum 10-year prison term.

Since 2001, hundreds of suspected Islamic militants have been rounded up in police raids in several European countries, and many remain in custody under anti-terrorism laws that allow prolonged detentions. Only a handful have been brought to trial or convicted of specific plots.

Word of a plot against the Paris embassy first came from a confession that Beghal gave in Dubai, where he was arrested in July 2001. He was extradited to France in September 2001, and the official French investigation opened the day before the hijackings in the United States.

Once in France, Beghal retracted the confession, saying it was obtained after “methodical torture.”

During the trial, prosecutors argued that the defendants were Islamic radicals linked to Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda network and that the plot was conceived in Afghanistan, where Beghal and Daoudi received training in 2000 and 2001. Beghal was said to have ties to the London-based Syrian cleric Abu Qatada, whom Britain has called a spiritual inspiration for the Sept. 11 attacks.

The six men maintained their innocence throughout the trial and said they were only friends, not a terrorist cell. Beghal and Daoudi, who spoke at length during the trial but stood impassively Tuesday with the others as the verdicts were read, have said they were devoutly religious but denied being involved in any terrorist plots.

“One would think we’re in an Inquisition tribunal,” Beghal said when his trial began in January. “I’m one of those who are in permanent search of religious knowledge. If that can constitute a new sect to you, go on then,” he said. Beghal said that he met Abu Qatada in Germany but that he was not a follower of the cleric.

Daoudi acknowledged that he visited Afghanistan in 2001 but said he went as a tourist because it was “a mythical country, a bit like our promised land.” Daoudi, who once worked in a suburban Paris Internet cafe, traveled to Britain in 2001 to escape a police raid against Islamic militants, but was extradited to France the same year.

On the hard drive of his computer, investigators found writings by a senior al Qaeda figure, Ayman Zawahiri. Daoudi said he kept them because “I am a very curious person.”

“When someone reads ‘Das Kapital,’ he is not necessarily a Marxist,” Daoudi said at one point in the trial.