* Three-year court battle involves Algerian man
* Defendant accused of luring U.S. women into holy war
* Trial links underwear bomber, Jihad Jane cases
By John Shiffman
DETROIT, Feb 21 (Reuters) – The phone call from Ireland to
Michigan lasted only five minutes. But what was said – and the
criminal charge that followed – continue to complicate U.S.
plans to prosecute an Algerian man at the vortex of the
so-called Jihad Jane terrorism conspiracy.
Ali Charaf Damache cannot be extradited to the United States
to face terrorism charges until Irish authorities finish
prosecuting him for the relatively minor crime of making a
threatening phone call to an activist in Detroit.
The Irish proceedings have languished for almost three years
as Damache filed repeated motions from prison. This week,
Damache’s trial began in southern Ireland, and through a video
link in Detroit, an Irish jury heard testimony from the Michigan
man Damache is accused of threatening.
If convicted, further appeals are likely, given that
pretrial motions reached the Irish Supreme Court.
The delay is yet another strange twist in the Jihad Jane
conspiracy, a case U.S. authorities have portrayed as
representing the new face of terrorism because it involved an
American-born, blond-haired white woman.
In the U.S. case, the woman who called herself Jihad Jane,
Colleen LaRose of Pennsburg, Pennsylvania, has pleaded guilty to
conspiring with Damache to kill Lars Vilks, the Swedish artist.
Vilks was accused of blaspheming the Prophet Mohammad by
depicting the prophet’s face on the head of a dog.
Another U.S.-born Muslim convert, Jamie Paulin Ramirez, also
pleaded guilty to joining Damache in Ireland to engage in jihad.
Ramirez, dubbed Jihad Jamie, married Damache when she arrived in
Ireland and was living with him when he is accused of making the
threatening call.
A third defendant in the Jihad Jane case, Mohammed H.
Khalid, pleaded guilty to providing support to terrorists,
including Damache. By pleading guilty, Khalid, a Maryland high
school honor student, became at age 18 the youngest person
charged with terrorism inside the United States.
LaRose, Ramirez and Khalid are scheduled to be sentenced in
early May in U.S. District Court in Philadelphia. The years-long
delay in their cases can be attributed in part to the Damache
legal quagmire in Ireland.
STAR WITNESS
The jury in Ireland has heard evidence related to a
different terrorism case – the 2009 Christmas Day attempt by a
Nigerian man, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, to set off explosives
hidden in his underwear as a Northwest Airlines flight from
Amsterdam neared Detroit. Abdulmutallab has pleaded guilty and
is serving a life sentence.
In January 2010, during one of Abdulmutallab’s first court
appearances in Detroit, local Muslim-American activist Majed
Moughni organized a rally outside the courthouse to condemn the
bombing attempt. With his wife, Vivian Moughni, he held a banner
that read, “Not in the name of Islam.”
Testifying by video from Detroit on Wednesday, Moughni told
jurors that his rally garnered widespread media attention,
including an appearance on CNN. The following morning he
received a threatening phone call at home from an unidentified
man who was angry because Moughni had spoken out against the
underwear bomber.
The call lasted about five minutes and Moughni recorded the
final three minutes, which were played in court Wednesday. “I
would put a bullet in your head because you are a hypocrite,”
the caller said.
“I got the shivers,” Moughni testified in answer to a
question by an Irish prosecutor, Michael Delaney. “I was
terrified.”
Moughni reported the call to the local Dearborn, Michigan,
police and to a journalist at the Detroit Free Press, he
testified. Fearing that the threat was real, Moughni said he
slept with his four children and wife locked in a bedroom for a
week afterward, with a kitchen knife by his side.
Damache was arrested by Irish police on March 9, 2010, the
day the U.S. charges in the Jihad Jane case were unsealed.
Moughni testified that he did not learn of the connection
between the two cases until about a month later.
Authorities have not explained how they linked Damache to
the call, although court records reveal that the FBI asked Irish
police to put Damache under surveillance at about the same time
LaRose and Ramirez moved in with him: in September 2009.
During cross-examination, Micheal O’Higgins, a defense
attorney for Damache, called Moughni a publicity hound.
O’Higgins accused Moughni of using the threat to further his
political career, which included an unsuccessful campaign for
Congress in 2010. If he was so concerned about the threat to his
family, O’Higgins asked, why did he alert the media the same day
he went to the police?
“Publicity is very important,” Moughni said, adding that
using the media is an effective way to spread his message for
what he called “the cause” – telling the public that most
American Muslims do not support Islamic terrorists.
O’Higgins called Moughni’s rationale “bogus” and suggested
he was motivated by politics, not justice.
A DISAPPOINTING MAN
Neither LaRose nor Ramirez is expected to testify at this
week’s trial in Ireland, people familiar with the matter said.
A Reuters series in December documented each women’s
disillusionment with Damache, an unemployed salesman, after he
lured them to Ireland with promises to wage a holy war.
“When I got there, nothing was the way he said it was,”
LaRose told Reuters in an interview. “He was unemployed, living
in an apartment that he was fixing to get kicked out of.”
Damache married Ramirez the day she arrived from Colorado
with her young son. According to confidential records reviewed
by Reuters, Ramirez joined Damache in Ireland because she was
dissatisfied with her life in Colorado.
Damache had promised to teach her Arabic and the ways of
Islam. But within a month of arriving in Ireland, Ramirez began
to regret the decision.
“I wish I was never stupid enough to come here,” she typed
in a note reviewed by Reuters. “This man has no intentions to
make this relationship work, ever I am just a sex slave to
him.”
According to an account of Thursday’s court proceedings by
the Irish Examiner newspaper, Damache’s ex-wife, Mary Cronin,
told the jury that he first introduced himself as a Frenchman
named Alex Thierry Garnier and was not religious.
But his personality transformed between their 2002 marriage
and 2008 separation, the Examiner reported. He became a
practicing Muslim, and Cronin grew frightened of him.
During their final meeting, she testified, “He came to the
house. I didn’t want to let him in. I was afraid of him. He had
changed.”
(Reporting By John Shiffman; Editing by Blake Morrison and
Douglas Royalty)
