Excerpts: Egypt's president vows release of first World Trade plotter July
05, 2012

+++SOURCE: CBS The Blotter via Egypt Daily News 5 July '12:"Egypt's new
president vows to win the release of World Trade Center Plotter"By Rym
Montaz

SUBJECT: Egypt's president vows release of first World Trade plotter

QUOTE:" 'the blind sheikh is serving a life sentence in a federal prison for
his role in the 1993 bombing

FULL TEXT:Egypt's president-elect has vowed to win the release of an
Egyptian cleric jailed by the U.S. for planning the first attack on New
York's World Trade Center.

Omar Abdel-Rahman, "the blind sheikh," is serving a life sentence in a
federal prison for his role in the 1993 bombing that killed six people in
lower Manhattan. The attack on the World Trade Center launched by al Qaeda
eight years later on Sept. 11, 2001, killed nearly 3,000 people.

""I see banners for Omar Abdel Rahman's family, and for prisoners arrested
according to martial rulings and detainees from the beginning of the
revolution," said Egyptian president-elect Mohammed Morsi to a buoyant crowd
of Islamist supporters in Cairo's Tahrir Square on Friday[29 June]. "It is
my duty to make every effort, and I will beginning tomorrow, to secure their
release, among them Omar Abdel Rahman."

Rahman, 74, a veteran of Egypt's Islamist movement, was jailed in Egypt for
allegedly helping to inspire the assassination of President Anwar Sadat. He
entered the U.S. in 1990. One of his followers was convicted of gun
possession, though acquitted of murder, after the assassination of Jewish
leader Rabbi Meir Kahane in New York in 1990.

Using evidence collected by an Egyptian informant, the U.S. government
prosecuted Rahman for conspiracy in connection with the February 1993 World
Trade Center attack. After the attack, the government recorded Rahman
encouraging further violence against targets in New York and New Jersey.
Rahman and nine followers were arrested in June 1993, and he was sentenced
to life in prison in 1996. He is presently incarcerated at the Butner
federal facility in North Carolina, where Ponzi schemer Bernie Madoff, also
74, is serving his own effective life sentence.

In 2005, lawyer Lynne Stewart was convicted of serving as a messenger
between Rahman and Islamists in Egypt. She was sentenced to 28 months in
federal prison, and then resentenced to 10 years in prison in 2010 because
of alleged perjury
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Sue Lerner - Associate, IMRA