Bombing Plot Case Stumbles Fbi Agent’s Notes Incomplete; U.S. Airliners Alleged Targets
The federal government’s case against three men accused of plotting to bomb U.S. jetliners experienced a setback Wednesday when an FBI agent conceded that his notes failed to show that he had asked one of the defendants, Wali Khan Amin Shah, if he had participated in the bombing conspiracy.
Frank Pellegrino, the FBI agent with primary responsibility for the case, testified Monday and Tuesday about potentially incriminating statements made by Shah and another defendant, Abdul Hakim Murad, when the agent brought them to the United States from Malaysia and the Philippines last year.
Prosecutors contend that the two men joined the third defendant, Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, in a conspiracy to blow up a dozen jumbo jetliners in Asia as revenge for U.S. support of Israel. Yousef will stand trial later on separate charges that he planned the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993.
Pellegrino said that he questioned Shah on the plane for five or six hours on Dec. 12, 1995, after the Malaysian police turned him over. Under cross-examination by Shah’s lawyer, David S. Greenfield, the agent said he thought that he had asked Shah if he participated in the bombing plot, but then he grudgingly acknowledged that his six pages of notes made no mention of it.
The interview with Shah was not taped or taken down verbatim, he said, and his notes were “just to jog a memory” in preparing his report. Pellegrino said he asked Shah about “Bojinka,” a code name that prosecutors contend was used for the bombing plot. “He said he didn’t know what the ‘Bojinka’ plan was,” the FBI agent said.
The cross-examination by Greenfield seemed intended to persuade the jury that Pellegrino had not properly investigated Shah’s involvement in the affair and had not ascertained his mental state before interviewing him.
Before he read Shah his rights and questioned him, Pellegrino said, he did not offer him the services of an Arabic interpreter aboard the aircraft. He also said he had not asked whether Shah was deprived of food or sleep or otherwise mistreated before Malaysian police handed him over.
On Monday, Pellegrino testified that he questioned Murad for six hours on April 12, 1995, and that the defendant admitted “going to the Philippines to participate in a bombing.”
In her cross-examination Wednesday, Murad’s lawyer, Clover M. Barrett, brought out that Pellegrino met frequently with police officials in the Philippines during the three months that they detained Murad but did not try to see him there.
Murad has retracted his statement, contending that he was tortured by Philippine police before the FBI took him into custody.