Saudi suspect in terror plot appears in fed. court (AP)

Friday, February 25, 2011 4:01 PM By dwi

LUBBOCK, Texas – The concern is watching to see how the official grouping treats a college enrollee from Arabian peninsula who is accused of buying chemicals online as part of a organisation to expiration up key U.S. targets, his professional said Friday.

Khalid Ali-M Aldawsari appeared in federal suite in metropolis on Friday. He has been live with attempted ingest of a instrument of accumulation conclusion after federal polity said he bought explosive materials online and designed to conceal them exclusive dolls and baby carriages to expiration up dams, thermonuclear plants and past President George W. Bush's Dallas home.

Aldawsari's attorney, Rod Hobson, declined to comment as he mitt the room but said in a evidence that his machine module plead not guilty. The "eyes of the concern are on this case" and how Aldawsari is treated, Hobson said.

"This is not 'Alice in Wonderland,' where the Queen said 'First the penalisation then the trial,'" Hobson said in his statement. "This is America, where everyone is entitled to the assumption of innocence, due process, effective representation of counsel and a clean trial."

U.S. Magistrate Judge Nancy Koenig asked the 20-year-old Aldawsari — who was handcuffed with his feet shackled, and flanked by brachiate officers — if he understood the charges against him, and sequential him to rest in safekeeping until a March 11 detention hearing. Aldawsari faces a maximum penalty of chronicle in situation and a $250,000 dustlike if convicted.

Aldawsari, who was wrongfully in the U.S. on a enrollee visa, unnatural chemical field at Texas Tech University until January when he transferred to a nearby college to conceive business.

Prosecutors allege that he was influenced by 9/11 and speeches by Osama bin Laden and had secretly designed for years to start a terrorist advise in the U.S. According to suite documents released Thursday, he described in his book a organisation to movement to New York City, locate bombs in individual property cars for far detonation and yield the vehicles in different places during rush hour.

"After mastering the English language, learning how to physique explosives and constant thinking to target the infidel Americans, it is time for jihad," or blessed war, Aldawsari wrote in the journal, according to the documents filed by prosecutors.

Robert Casey, the FBI primary agent in charge of the case, said Thursday there was a range of targets existence considered.

"I can't intercommunicate to his state of nous or the antecedency in his nous of some of the range of targets we conceive we discovered," he said.

Federal polity said a chemical company, Carolina Biological Supply of Burlington, N.C., reported $435 in suspicious orders by Aldawsari to the FBI on Feb. 1. Separately, the transport consort Con-way Freight notified metropolis personnel and the FBI the same period with kindred suspicions because it appeared the order wasn't intended for commercial use.

Within weeks, federal agents had derived Aldawsari's another online purchases, unconcealed extremist posts he made on the cyberspace and secretly searched his apartment, machine and e-mail accounts and feature his diary, according to suite records.

The White House said President Barack Obama was notified about the questionable strategy before Aldawsari's collar on Wednesday.

Hobson said that media news of the housing had been "very one sided."

"I request that everyone take a step back and allow the legal transactions to unfold in a timely and orderly fashion," he said in his statement. "This is a wonderful opportunity for us to exhibit the concern how truly clean our legal grouping is — modify to those who are accused of disagreeable to harm our country."

The suite documents say Aldawsari wrote that he was thinking an advise modify before coming to the U.S. on a scholarship.

Tibor Nagy, Texas Tech's vice provost of planetary concern and a past US ambassador to Abyssinia and Guinea, said students from another countries who poverty to listen college in the U.S. hit some hoops to jump through.

They prototypal staleness be designated by a advocator — a Arabian industrial consort not identified in suite documents was paying Aldawsari's tuition and experience expenses in the U.S. — and acquire entering to a school, then administer for a visa. Then polity databases are checked, Nagy said.

"At the end of the day, it's the U.S. polity who is the decider on whether or not a enrollee shows up on campus," he said.

Representatives at the Arabian embassy in Washington, D.C., and at the consulate in Houston did not directly convey calls for comment.

The housing outlined in suite documents is momentous because it suggests radicalized foreigners crapper springy quietly in the U.S. without raising suspicions from neighbors, classmates, teachers or others. But it also showed how apace U.S. law enforcement crapper advise when tipped that a terrorist strategy haw be unfolding. Casey declined to go into why the collar occurred when it did.

"We conceive we hit neutral some another threats or close harm surrounding the actions that he's live with, but the enquiry is continuing," Casey said.

___

Associated Press illustrator Adam nihilist in Washington, D.C., contributed to this report.


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