An ex-al Qaeda chieftain and Osama bin Laden aide who helped plan the 1998 bombings of two US embassies in Africa was sentenced to life in prison Friday — with a woman blinded in the attack standing up in court with her guide dog at her side to announce, “Osama bin Laden did not win.”
Khaled al-Fawwaz, 52, was convicted in February on four counts of conspiracy for his role in the attacks in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, which killed 224 people and wounded thousands.
“Al-Fawwaz, you are a travesty to the human race,” said Edith Bartley in Manhattan federal court, adding that her brother and father were both killed in the bombings.
“I’m totally blind. I had a career ahead of me. It’s gone. Now I have a guide dog,” said Ellen Karas, who was working in the US Embassy in Nairobi when she heard a noise outside and watched a co-worker climb on a table to look out the window.
“That was the last thing I ever saw. Four hours later I was dug out of the building,” Karas told the packed courtroom, her 4-year-old black lab guide dog, Roger, standing next to the podium as she spoke.
“I’ll go on living to prove that Osama bin Laden didn’t win. We are all here. He is gone. And thank the Lord, it will stay that way forever.”
The convicted terrorist asked permission to “face his victims” when he spoke in court Friday.
“I do not support violence,” he said, his long beard hanging down above his potbelly.
But US District Judge Lewis Kaplan called the Saudi man a liar for claiming he was against violence.
“So far as your statement is concerned, I do not credit it as truthful,” Kaplan said, noting that al-Fawwaz worked for bin Laden after the evil mastermind declared global jihad against Americans.
“You were all in on that program,” Kaplan said.
Al-Fawwaz led a terror cell in Nairobi starting in 1993 and later served as bin Laden’s spokesman in London.
He was not charged with planning the bombings but he did help bin Laden “prepare and disseminate his sanguinary calls to Muslims to kill Americans” and helped buy and send vehicles, generators, and satellite phones to Afghanistan to help al Qaeda, court papers state.