Indian engineer jailed in US for 27 years

Washington : A 39-year-old Indian engineer has been sentenced to more than 27 years in prison in the US for providing material support to al-Qaeda leader Anwar al-Awlaki and plotting from his cell to kill a judge who oversaw his trial, reports PTI.

Yahya Farooq Mohammad pleaded guilty in July to charges of conspiracy to provide and conceal material support or resources to terrorists and solicitation to commit a crime of violence.

Following his arrest on terrorism charges, Mohammad tried to orchestrate the killing of the judge presiding over his case, US District Judge Jack Zouhary, from his prison cell, prosecutors said.

“For those who wish to harm the United States and support terrorists, whether in Yemen, the United Arab Emirates, or right here in Toledo, these decades of prison serve as an important reminder that America’s law enforcement will pursue justice across the globe,” US Attorney Justin Herdman said in a statement on Monday.

“He threatened the safety of our citizens, a judge and the independent judiciary. Now he is being held accountable.”

Mohammad’s attorneys argued in their sentencing memo that the inmate he spoke to in jail was “extremely manipulative and totally unreliable.”

However, the attorneys admitted the risk of Mohammad being convicted at trial was too great, so they reached a plea agreement.

His plea agreement also calls for him to be deported after he finishes serving his sentence, which US District Judge Edmund Sargus ordered, cleveland.com reported.

Mohammad was arrested in 2015 along with his brother, Ibrahim Zubair Mohammad, and brothers Asif Ahmed Salim and Sultane Room Salim. The other three men have pleaded not guilty in the case.

The four men are accused of conspiring to gather money and equipment to provide support to al-Awlaki, the late American-born, radical Muslim cleric whose English language videos and blog posts inspired a number of Western recruits to al-Qaeda, as well as acts of terrorism, federal prosecutors said.

Mohammad, born in the United Arab Emirates, travelled in 2009 with two other people to Yemen in an attempt to meet with Awlaki, who was killed in a US drone strike in 2011. He was unable to find Awlaki, so he instead gave USD 22,000 to one of the cleric’s associates, prosecutors said.

Mohammad studied engineering at Ohio State University from 2002 to 2004. He and his brother, also a citizen of India, married US citizens.

Indian-origin pharmacist on trial for murder of father in UK

London : An Indian-origin pharmacist in the UK has gone on trial this week for killing his elderly father by injecting him with a lethal dose of morphine at their home in Surrey, south-east England. Bipin Desai has denied the murder charge but admitted to assisting his 85-year-old father, Dhirajlal Desai, commit suicide because he had been depressed and wanted to end his life.

But prosecutor William Boyce told Guildford Crown Court on Monday that it was his intention to disguise the death as natural but came forward with the assisted suicide claim only when it emerged that a post-mortem would be conducted on his father’s body and the lethal drugs in his bloodstream would be revealed. “He knew when he went to work (the next day) that his father was dead. You have to consider what kind of actor he is,” Boyce told the court.

 The 59-year-old pharmacist admitted giving his father a fruit smoothie containing morphine and later injecting him with a lethal dose of insulin in August 2015. He has pleaded guilty to two counts of theft relating to stealing the two drugs from his workplace, Vaughan James Chemist in Farnham.

The post-mortem examination on his father revealed he had 1,038mg of free morphine per litre of blood in his system when he died. Boyce told the court that there was no evidence to support Desai’s claims about helping to fulfil his father’s wishes to die. “He suffered no debilitating or disabling symptoms. He was not, on the face of it, near death despite his advancing years,” he told the jury.

The court was told how Desai had even made breakfast for his father the next day to disguise the killing as a natural death. He called the 999 emergency number and said he had just come home and noticed his father’s curtains were closed and the breakfast had remained untouched. “It was the start of a whole series of protracted lies told by this defendant,” the prosecution said.

A few days later, accompanied by his wife Dipti and sons Samir and Nichil, Desai went into a police station to claim that he had assisted his father commit suicide because he had wanted to be “reunited” with his late wife and dog. “He said over the past four or five days his father had talked about ending his life, about wanting to ‘go upstairs’ which he took to mean heaven,” the prosecution said.  Desai’s trial is ongoing at Guildford Crown Court and is expected to conclude by next week.