Kenyan and Tanzanian Embassy Bombers Trial: 2001

The first witness was a government informant. Jamal Ahmed Mohamed Al-Fadl testified he heard bin Laden say, "The snake is America and we have to cut their head off and stop what they are doing in the Horn of Africa."

Questioned by prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald, Al-Fadl said Al Qaeda was "for focusing on jihad"—a declaration of a holy war—and implicated El-Hage in the violence. Cross-examining, El-Hage's attorney, Sam S. Schmidt, claiming his client was only a nonviolent business associate of bin Laden, tried to undermine Al-Fadl's credibility.

Over several days, the jury heard witnesses describe bin Laden's antiAmerican fatwahs, or religious declarations, and his group's responsibility for the deaths of American soldiers in Mogadishu, Somalia, in 1993. One witness said El-Hage, a naturalized American citizen in Texas, helped bin Laden buy a used jet plane in Dallas to fly anti-aircraft missiles from Pakistan to his Sudan headquarters.

Now the prosecutors read aloud the 52-page English translation of bin Laden's 1996 fatwah declaring holy war against the U.S. as he opposed the deployment of non-Islamic American troops to protect the holy Muslim shrines of his oil-rich Saudi peninsula after Iraq invaded Kuwait.

Prosecution witness L'Houssaine Kherchtou testified that Odeh and El-Hage had known each other in Kenya in the mid-1990s. He named other indicted fugitives as Al Qaeda members, saying Odeh traveled with them to oppose a United Nations mission that included American troops. On crossexamination, however, Kherchtou said he could not be sure of El-Hage's association with Al Qaeda.