Guyanese Abdel Nur, who last year pleaded guilty to aiding a plot to blow up New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport, was this afternoon sentenced to 15 years in prison, a Bloomberg report has said.
According to the report Nur, 61, was sentenced by US District Judge Dora Irizarry in Brooklyn, New York. He had pleaded guilty in June, on the eve of his trial, to one count of providing support to terrorists.
“This plot was intended to cause great economic harm to the United States and to cause death and serious physical injury to countless people,” Irizarry the report quoted the judge as saying.
The plot was hatched by Russell Defreitas–another Guyanese who is a US citizen–in 2006, and was designed to blow up fuel lines and tanks and, ultimately, “the whole of Kennedy,” Defreitas said in a taped conversation. The airport, the largest in the New York area, is located in the borough of Queens.
The plotters conducted airport surveillance, including videotaping its buildings, and sought expert advice, financing and explosives, said prosecutors in the office of US Attorney Loretta Lynch. They circulated the plan to an international network of Muslim extremists, according to the government.
Former PNCR parliamentarian Abdul Kadir, 59, was sentenced December 15, 2010 to life in prison for his role in the plot.
Defreitas, 67, a former cargo worker at the airport, is scheduled to be sentenced on February 17 after one of one of his lawyers fell ill. He was originally scheduled to be sentenced on January 21.
In June last year, after deliberating for five days, the jury delivered guilty verdicts for Kadir and Defreitas.
A fourth defendant, Kareem Ibrahim, 65, a citizen of Trinidad, was granted a separate trial, slated for April, due to a medical condition. Nur himself was late last year said to be very ill and was hospitalized suffering from cancer.
Kadir has since filed an appeal against his sentence and in a hand written letter to the judge on December 25, 2010 he said he was not satisfied with the performance of his lawyers Kafahni Nkrumah and Toni Messina and asked that they be replaced.
“…I foresee amongst other things, a claim of ineffective assistance of counsel. I am therefore requesting a change of counsel,” Kadir wrote.
“I have been sentenced to life imprisonment, convicted of a terrorist crime which I did not commit. And I would therefore be grateful for the new counsel, drawn from the appellate panel to be preferable one who has some experience in the issues related to my case (terrorism issues),” he further said.
