There is more than enough proof that would allow a jury to decide to convict Osama bin Laden's son-in-law and al-Qaeda spokesman of conspiring to kill Americans, a judge said as he turned down a defence request to dismiss the case.
"The government's evidence in (the count) of the conspiracy to murder Americans is dramatically more than merely sufficient," US District Judge Lewis A Kaplan said on Friday.
He added that he also saw evidence as "more than sufficient to warrant a conviction" on other charges concerning providing material support to terrorists.
The verdict "is ultimately up to the jury, not me," he noted.
"But it is sufficient to permit the jury to convict on all counts."
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Prosecutors rested their case on Friday in the trial of Sulaiman Abu Ghaith, the highest-level al-Qaeda figure to be tried in the US since the September 11 attacks. The defence case is due to start Monday.
Prosecutors say Abu Ghaith was part of al-Qaeda's deadly plotting in his role as spokesman in fiery videos and interviews after 9/11 and as a motivational speaker at the group's training camps in Afghanistan in the summer before the attacks.
Prosecutors have built their case partly on his own words, including a declaration on September 12, 2001, that "the storm of airplanes will not abate."
Abu Ghaith's lawyers have said the Kuwait-born imam made inflammatory remarks but didn't conspire to carry out terrorism.
He said in a statement to authorities after his arrest last year that as 9/11 approached, he knew nothing of any specific plan to attack the US, though he'd heard "something big was going to happen."
"The government has not met its burden (of proof), and the case should be dismissed," one of his lawyers, Zoe Dolan, said Friday in urging Kaplan to toss out the case.
Defence lawyers have sought information from professed September 11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed, and they're likely to revisit Monday whether they can use it at the trial.
They recently received answers to written questions they sent to Mohammed in a detention facility in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, but they would need Kaplan's OK to introduce the information.
The defence has suggested Mohammed could help rebut the government's claim that Abu Ghaith must have known in advance of al-Qaeda's so-called shoe bomb aeroplane plots, including Richard Reid's attempt to carry one out in December 2001.
