5 convicted - after two mistrials

MIAMI - After two mistrials, a federal jury yesterday reached verdicts in the Bush-era terrorism case of six Miami men charged with conspiring with an FBI informant they believed was an al-Qaeda representative to blow up Chicago's landmark Sears Tower and federal buildings in Florida.

The jury convicted five of the so-called the Liberty City Six - ringleader Narseal Batiste, 35, along with Patrick Abraham, 29; Stanley Grant Phanor, 33; Rotschild Augustine, 25; and Burson Augustin, 24.

The only freed man was Naudimar Herrera, 25, who hugged the other defendants and his attorney, Richard Houlihan, after the verdicts.

"It's not right. They don't deserve this," said Herrera, who condemned the guilty verdicts for his fellow defendants. "All of us were supposed to be innocent. It's all B.S. They're going to come back and fight this. It ain't over."

The team of defense attorneys trashed the government's case as a "set-up."

The guilty verdicts were a belated victory for the former Bush administration and cheered the prosecution, which had seen two previous trials end with deadlocked jurors and the acquittal of a seventh defendant, Lyglenson Lemorin.

The U.S. Attorney's Office in Miami had indicated that it would not have retried the six men if the third trial had ended in a hung jury.

The verdict was one of two victories yesterday for U.S. terror prosecutors. In New York, a jury convicted a Lebanese-born Swede of plotting to help al-Qaeda recruit by trying to set up a weapons-training post in Oregon and distributing terrorist training manuals over the Internet, the Associated Press reported. The verdict against Oussama Kassir capped a three-week trial.

The Liberty City Six - from one of Miami's poorest neighborhoods - were charged with four counts of conspiring to provide material support to a foreign terrorist organization; provide material support to terrorists; destroy buildings with explosives; and levy war against the U.S. government in a seditious act.

Batiste - a former Chicago resident who was accused of being the mastermind of the alleged plot to blow up the Sears Tower - was the only defendant found guilty on all four counts.

Batiste, detained since his arrests with the others in June 2006, faces 70 years in prison. Abraham, a Haitian national, could serve up to 50 years. Phanor and the Augustin brothers, whose bonds were revoked by U.S. District Judge Joan Lenard, face up to 30 years. Sentencings are set for July 27.

The jury, which began deliberations April 27 after a two-month trial, was interrupted twice - the first time after a sick juror had to be replaced, and the second time after the judge removed a recalcitrant panelist because she refused to deliberate with the others. The jury reconvened May 5.

The case, involving secret recordings of phones, warehouses, and homes, was a sting operation.

In late 2005 and early 2006, the FBI wanted to test the militancy of Batiste, a Messianic-like figure who held sway over the other defendants.

The Chicago transplant tried to set up a construction business and religious organization called the Moorish Science Temple in a warehouse in Liberty City.

In the third trial, prosecutors put a new spin on the evidence by portraying Batiste as an admirer of a notorious Chicago criminal, Jeff Fort. A drug trafficker who led a black militant gang, Fort was convicted in 1987 of conspiring with Libya to terrorize the United States. But no evidence directly linked Batiste to Fort.

In fact, the government's case hinged on two FBI informants. The first, a convenience-store clerk from Yemen with a criminal history, snitched on Batiste after hearing him talk about his militant ideas.

At the FBI's direction, he introduced Batiste to the second informant, a more polished Middle Eastern man who posed as an al-Qaeda representative. He insinuated his way into Batiste's group by proposing al-Qaeda could help him on his mission to blow up the Sears Tower if Batiste could assist al-Qaeda in destroying FBI buildings.

The informant's plan was a fiction, designed to see how far Batiste would go with his extremist ambitions.

In the end, the case likely turned on Batiste and his followers' taking oaths to al-Qaeda and taking surveillance video of target sites, such as the FBI building in North Miami Beach and federal courthouse in downtown Miami.

But when FBI agents arrested the men nearly three years ago at their warehouse in Liberty City, they found no weapons of mass destruction and no terrorism blueprints.

"It wasn't until this informant came into the picture that things changed. All we wanted from him was money. It was like a dangling carrot," Herrera said.