Nov 10, 2008 2:23 pm US/Eastern
Informant: 2 Ft. Dix Suspects Not Involved In Plot
CAMDEN, N.J. (AP) ―
An FBI informant said Monday that two of the five men accused of plotting an attack on soldiers at the Army's Fort Dix "had nothing to do" with the scheme.
Informant Mahmoud Omar said one defendant -- Mohamad Shnewer -- told him the other men were on board with the plot.
But Omar said during cross-examination Monday that when he mentioned that to Dritan "Tony" Duka and Shain "Shaheen" Duka during a fishing trip 2006, the brothers didn't know what he was talking about.
"I was surprised because what Mohamad had told me was different," Omar said during his seventh day on the stand.
Omar, who is being paid $1,500 a week to work for the government, said he told the FBI the two Duka brothers were not part of a plot.
The brothers were arrested in Omar's apartment in May 2007 while allegedly trying to buy an arsenal of automatic rifles.
Shnewer's lawyer, Rocco Cipparone, didn't ask Omar about the other two suspects, Eljvir Duka and Serdar Tatar, because they were not on the fishing trip that was being dissected during testimony. Cipparone didn't ask Omar whether later on in the investigation it seemed as if the two Duka brothers were involved in a plot.
Defense lawyers contend that Omar and Shnewer talked about an attack but that the other men were not involved, and that even Shnewer was not serious about it. It was the informant, they claim, that tried to make it look like there was a plot.
The five men, all in their 20s at the time of the arrests, are foreign-born Muslims who lived for years in the comfortable Philadelphia suburb of Cherry Hill.
They're charged with conspiracy to kill military personnel, attempted murder and weapons offenses. They could face life in prison if convicted.
The government's investigation into the alleged plot began with a tip from a clerk at a Circuit City electronics store in Mount Laurel. He called police in January 2006 after seeing home-shot video featuring men at a firing range shouting "Allah Akbar," Arabic for "God is Great."
The men shot the footage themselves during a trip to the Pocono Mountains in Pennsylvania.
During questioning Monday, Omar said that all three Duka brothers referred to trips the men took to the Poconos as vacations, not as training for an attack.
(© 2009 The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.)
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