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Y2K bomb plot accomplice sentenced to 24 years in jail

Mokhtar Haouari was found guilty in a federal court in Manhattan last July.

By Phil Hirschkorn
and Deborah Feyerick
CNN New York Bureau

NEW YORK (CNN) -- An accomplice to the al Qaeda-trained terrorist who plotted to bomb Los Angeles International Airport around New Year's 2000 was sentenced Wednesday to 24 years in prison.

The sentence handed down in Manhattan federal court for Mokhtar Haouari, an Algerian-born Montreal shopkeeper, was close to the maximum allowed by law.

Haouari was found guilty last July of conspiring to provide material support to a terrorist act for helping fellow Algerian national Ahmed Ressam, in a plan to detonate a suitcase bomb at LAX.

"I am sentencing at the higher end of the guideline range because the defendant's conduct here created a grave risk to the well being and safety of the American people," said U.S. District Judge John Keenan in handing down the sentence.

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The jury had acquitted Haouari of a second terrorism charge of aiding and abetting a terrorist act, because the government failed to prove that Haouari knew what Ressam was planning to do in the United States.

"Mr. Haouari either knew or consciously avoided learning the details of Ressam's plan to blow up the Los Angeles airport. Such activity is reprehensible and must be gravely punished, else the law becomes a mockery and society becomes prey to the forces of evil and destruction," Keenan said.

The millennium bomb plot collapsed on December 14, 1999, when Ressam, trying to cross the border by ferry from Canada, was arrested after he fled a routine automobile inspection at a U.S. entry point near Seattle.

Agents found explosive materials, including the fertilizer urea and nitric acid, and homemade timing devices in the trunk of Ressam's rented sedan.

Until this trial, neither Ressam nor the government had publicly disclosed the intended target. Ressam said he picked LAX "because it was sensitive politically and economically."

Prosecutors said Haouari supported the plot by loaning Ressam roughly $2,000 and making him a fake Canadian driver's license before his trip.

Haouari also arranged for an English-speaking friend to meet him in Seattle and drive him around. That childhood friend, Abdel Ghani Meskini, and Ressam both testified against Haouari, in pursuit of lighter sentences for themselves.

Ressam had led authorities to Meskini by leaving a scrap of paper in his car; "Ghani" and Meskini's Brooklyn phone number were written on it.

Meskini previously testified against Ressam, who was convicted in his own trial last April in Los Angeles.

Though Ressam never disclosed the plot to Haouari, Ressam testified that Haouari knew he underwent explosives and weapons training in 1998 at Islamic militant camps inside Afghanistan. Meskini testified he told Haouari he wanted to go to the camps too, and that was why Haouari recommended him to Ressam.

Ressam's testimony offered the first public airing in a U.S. court of life inside the terrorist training camps once run by Saudi exile Osama bin Laden, though Ressam never mentioned the leader's name.

For six months in Afghanistan, Ressam said he learned how to fire machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades; how to make explosives from TNT and C4; how to poison people with cyanide; how to assassinate people and to sabotage urban infrastructure.

Ressam said the Taliban sold the camp its weapons. He said there were fighters from Algeria, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Germany, France, Turkey and Chechnya, and that cells were split by nationality.

Ressam left with $12,000 seed money "to carry out an operation in America," he said. Other cells planned millennium attacks in Europe, the Persian Gulf and Israel, Ressam testified.

When the other five members of his cell couldn't get to Canada, Ressam said he turned to Haouari and Meskini for help.

Both Ressam and Meskini said they discussed "jihad" with Haouari and shared the view that the United States was the biggest "enemy of Islam."

Ressam had met Haouari in 1994 after he immigrated to Canada with a fake passport, and they later engaged in criminal activities.

Trial evidence showed that Haouari and Meskini had engaged for years in credit card and counterfeit check schemes, and that Haouari trafficked in fake and stolen passports, driver licenses, and citizenship cards.

The jury convicted Haouari of four counts of bank, credit card and document fraud -- unrelated to the bomb plot.

Defense attorney Dan Ollen conceded during the trial that Haouari was a "con man" and a "two-bit thief" but not "an international terrorist." He had no comment on the sentence.