candypreet
06-17-2005, 12:35 PM
A Pakistani man and two Frenchmen of Pakistani origin who at first had been suspected of helping shoebomber Richard Reid were found guilty of having links to a Kashmir Islamic separatist group.
The Paris court on Thursday sentenced the main defendant, Ghulam Rama, 67, a Pakistani who headed the Chemin Droit (Straight Path) humanitarian group in France, to five years in prison.
Two men who trained for holy war in Kashmir camps with Rama's help, Hassan el-Cheguer and Hakim Mokhfi, both 31, were given four-year prison sentences.
All three were linked to the Lashkar e-Tayyiba group, an Islamic rebel movement in Kashmir.
They were all charged with criminal association in connection with a terrorist enterprise, a sweeping charge widely used in terror cases in France that carries a maximum 10-year sentence.
They were arrested in 2002, suspected of providing logistical support to Reid, a Briton serving a life sentence in the United States for trying to detonate a shoe bomb aboard a Paris-Miami flight in December 2001. However, the investigation did not bear out those suspicions _ denied by Rama.
"This case could have been named the Reid case, but it is not the Reid case," Prosecutor Sonya Djemni-Wagner said in court on May 26, two weeks after the trial started.
Reid is known to have been helped by the Pakistani community in France before boarding the trans-Atlantic flight, and Rama ran a butcher shop located near a restaurant where Reid ate during his Paris stay and near the cybercafe used by Reid to send messages to Pakistan.
However, investigators failed to turn up concrete proof that Rama provided meaningful logistical support to Reid.
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull&cid=1118888337746
The Paris court on Thursday sentenced the main defendant, Ghulam Rama, 67, a Pakistani who headed the Chemin Droit (Straight Path) humanitarian group in France, to five years in prison.
Two men who trained for holy war in Kashmir camps with Rama's help, Hassan el-Cheguer and Hakim Mokhfi, both 31, were given four-year prison sentences.
All three were linked to the Lashkar e-Tayyiba group, an Islamic rebel movement in Kashmir.
They were all charged with criminal association in connection with a terrorist enterprise, a sweeping charge widely used in terror cases in France that carries a maximum 10-year sentence.
They were arrested in 2002, suspected of providing logistical support to Reid, a Briton serving a life sentence in the United States for trying to detonate a shoe bomb aboard a Paris-Miami flight in December 2001. However, the investigation did not bear out those suspicions _ denied by Rama.
"This case could have been named the Reid case, but it is not the Reid case," Prosecutor Sonya Djemni-Wagner said in court on May 26, two weeks after the trial started.
Reid is known to have been helped by the Pakistani community in France before boarding the trans-Atlantic flight, and Rama ran a butcher shop located near a restaurant where Reid ate during his Paris stay and near the cybercafe used by Reid to send messages to Pakistan.
However, investigators failed to turn up concrete proof that Rama provided meaningful logistical support to Reid.
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull&cid=1118888337746