Sudan says it will fund lawyers for Guantanamo detainee about to stand trial

By MOHAMED OSMAN Associated Press Writer

KHARTOUM, Sudan, Feb 26, 2004 (AP) — Sudan will try to arrange defense counsel for its citizen who is slated to stand trial in a U.S. military court in Guantanamo Bay, a junior Sudanese Cabinet minister said in remarks published Thursday.

The government wants to make sure the military trial is fair and to provide a defense team that will “lead to his being declared innocent,” said Najeeb al-Khair, minister of state for foreign affairs.

The U.S. Defense Department said Tuesday that Ibrahim Ahmed Mahmoud al Qosi would stand trial for war crimes conspiracy. It said al Qosi, who turns 44 this year, had served as a bodyguard and an accountant to Osama bin Laden, the leader of the al-Qaida terror group. The group is blamed for the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington.

Al Qosi is currently one of more than 600 terror suspects held at the U.S. military detention center in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

A former school friend of al Qosi remembers him as being straightforward and generous, but said he changed when he went away in the 1980s.

“He was never a member of an organized Islamic group, but he was always sticking to the discipline and ritual of Islamic doctrine. He never liked politics,” the friend said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

He said he did not see al Qosi after he graduated from high school in 1982, but they bumped into each other in a Khartoum market in 1996.

“I was surprised by the changes that had occurred in his personality,” the friend recalled. Whereas previously al Qosi had been frank and spontaneous, he would not reveal where he had been since school.

Asked how he felt when he heard that al Qosi had been linked to bin Laden and was an alleged terrorist, the friend said he was “relieved to know that he is alive. I even cut his picture from the newspaper and kept it.”

The Pentagon also charged Tuesday a Yemeni citizen, Ali Hamza Ahmed Sulayman al Bahlul, accusing him of being a propagandist for bin Laden.

The two detainees will face the first U.S. military tribunal since World War II. If convicted, they could be sentenced to life in prison.

The men are alleged to have trained at al-Qaida camps in Afghanistan, but the charges do not say that either man carried out or planned a terrorist attack.