Last update - 00:00 05/01/2007
Defense rests after hearing from torture expert at U.S. Hamas trial
By Reauters
Attorneys for one of two men accused of furnishing thousands of dollars (euros) and fresh recruits to a Palestinian terrorist network rested their casein Chicago on Thursday following testimony from an expert on torture.
Closing arguments were set for Monday at the racketeering trial of former Chicago grocer Muhammad Salah, 53, and Abdelhaleem Ashqar, 48, a former assistant professor of business at Washington's Howard University.
Federal prosecutors say the two men were members of the Palestinian militant group Hamas and helped to bankroll a wave of terror that included bombings, kidnappings and murder aimed at toppling the Israeli government.
"Ladies and gentlemen, we are done with the evidentiary portion of this case," United States District Judge Amy J. St. Eve, who has presided over the 10-week trial, told the jurors before sending them home for the weekend.
Attorney William Moffitt, who represents Ashqar, rested his case weeks ago.
Salah attorney Michael E. Deutsch rested Thursday following testimony from a psychiatrist and torture expert, Dr. Metin Basoglu. Basoglu, an authority on the psychological mechanisms created by torture, testified over a live video feed from Istanbul where he lives.
Basoglu said a slipped disc in his back kept him from traveling.
Salah's attorneys are hoping Basoglu's testimony will reinforce Salah's claim that after his January 1993 arrest he was tortured by Israel's Shin Bet security agents into making incriminating statements.
Israeli police confiscated $97,000 in cash in his East Jerusalem hotel room, money they say was earmarked to pay for guns and bombs for Hamas. Salah, who grew up in a squalid West Bank refugee camp and later became a U.S. citizen, says the money was for Muslim charities.
He served almost five years in Israeli prisons before he returned to the U.S., where he immediately came under intense scrutiny by the FBI.
Basoglu, a specialist in psychiatry at Istanbul University and a senior lecturer at the University of London, said torture causes acute stress by making victims feel they have lost control of their situation.
He said the anxiety torture victims suffer during interrogation by the military or the police can become so intense as to be unbearable.
"Any one of us would comply in that situation," he said.
The trial began with opening statements in October. The prosecution's initial witnesses were two Shin Bet agents who interrogated Salah in 1993.
They testified under aliases in a courtroom cleared of spectators to protect them against possible reprisals by Hamas. But reporters were allowed to hear their testimony on closed-circuit TV in another room.
Both men denied Salah was ever tortured. Salah did not take the stand but his attorneys say he was put in a freezing cell with no blanket, forced to wear a foul-smelling hood and otherwise mistreated for weeks.
Former New York Times reporter Judith Miller testified that she witnessed part of Salah's 54-day interrogation at a high-security prison in Ramallah. She said he seemed to be in good spirits. Salah attorneys say Miller saw only a small fraction of what went on and was easily fooled.
Prosecution witnesses testified that when agents searched Ashqar's home they found Hamas records and literature and that he took part in a Philadelphia meeting at which the group's organizers mapped strategy.
His attorneys maintain that he merely was exercising his right to free speech and that nothing he did violated the law.
There is a third defendant in the case - Mousa Mohammad Abu Marzouk - allegedly a high-ranking member of the Hamas command now believed to be living in Damascus and classified as a fugitive.
A crowded courtroom was expected for closing arguments Monday. The case has drawn wide interest since August 2004 when then Attorney General John Ashcroft unveiled the indictment at a news conference, saying the three operated "a U.S.-based terrorist recruiting and financing cell."