NEW YORK?A purported key backer of Osama bin Laden pleaded guilty Wednesday to stabbing a prison guard in the eye with a sharpened comb, leaving him brain-damaged.
Mamdouh Mahmud Salim entered the plea in U.S. District Court in Manhattan before Judge Deborah A. Batts.
Salim, allegedly a founding member of bin Laden’s al Qaeda organization, had been scheduled to go on trial next week on charges that he maimed the guard, Louis Pepe, in November 2000 as part of a wider plot to take hostages and win the release of other prisoners at the Metropolitan Correctional Center.
Salim, 45, entered the guilty plea to charges of conspiracy to murder and attempted murder. The charges carry a penalty of up to life in prison plus 20 years. Sentencing was set for Aug. 5.
At the time of the attack, Salim was awaiting trial on other conspiracy charges in the August 1998 bombings of two U.S. embassies in Africa. Those charges against him are still pending and are not covered by his plea; no trial date has been set. Counting people who died of injuries later, the attacks killed 231 people, including 12 Americans.
“I’ve never been in court. I’ve never been in prison, I’ve never been charged with any crime before in my life,” Salim told the judge as he apologized for frequently asking questions about his plea agreement.
Batts closed the proceeding to the public when Salim described the crime because she said there was a possibility that the plea would not be accepted and she didn’t want his statement to prejudice a potential jury. She reopened the courtroom afterward, and said, “I accept your guilty plea and judge you guilty.”
Pepe was stabbed through the eye with a sharpened comb that entered his brain, and he is permanently disabled with brain damage. Prosecutors have said that Salim was aided in the assault by Khalfan Khamis Mohamed, who was convicted in the embassy bombings trial.
Salim’s defense lawyer, Richard Lind, said a charge of hostage taking?meaning the accosting of Pepe?is to be dropped at sentencing. A trial, he added, seemed unnecessary.
“At the end of the day, no matter how you considered it, the indisputable fact is that Officer Pepe had a comb shoved into his brain,” Lind said. “He pleaded guilty to stabbing Pepe in the eye.”
The minimum sentence is 18 years; prosecutors have said they will seek a life sentence.
“I’m not saying this is the greatest deal of all time,” the defense lawyer said. “He wanted to control his destiny, rather than have a jury control his destiny.”
Prosecutors portrayed Salim as one of bin Laden’s most loyal followers. They say that Salim, while running front companies for al Qaeda that purchased weaponry, once tried to buy uranium to build a nuclear bomb.
Salim was arrested in Germany in September 1998, the month after the embassy bombings. He was extradited to the United States three months later. Before that, he had opened several bank accounts in Germany, where investigators suspect three of the Sept. 11 suicide hijackers were recruited and financed by a terrorist cell.
In other news, interrogators of the most senior al Qaeda figure in U.S. custody intend to draw “every single thing out of him” that might head off terrorist acts, but they will not torture him, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said Wednesday.
At a Pentagon news conference, Rumsfeld heatedly denied news reports suggesting the U.S. might move Abu Zubaydah to a country where interrogators could use harsher methods of extracting information than would be deemed acceptable under U.S. human rights standards.