Four for Four

By JOHN DICKERSON

To each of the 38 charges, the forewoman of the jury gave the same answer. On conspiracy to bomb buildings: "Guilty." On explosive destruction of property: "Guilty." On assault on a federal officer: "Guilty." Again and again and again: "Guilty." But when that calm recitation ended, a different kind of oratory erupted. "Injustice! We are the victims!" shouted Mohammad Salameh, one of the four men on trial, pointing at the jury and pounding his fist on the table. "Allah-Akbar ((God is great))!" shouted the other defendants. "Al-Nasr lil-Islam ((Victory to Islam))!" And from the gallery came a retort New Yorkers in the court could understand. Cried the brother of defendant Nidal Ayyad: "You are all f---ing liars! My brother is innocent."

It was one year and six days after the explosion that killed six people, injured more than a thousand and tore a five-story hole in the World Trade Center. After a five-month trial, a jury of eight women and four men had convicted each of the four defendants on all charges in connection with the bombing. The prosecution called the bombing the greatest terrorist attack ever to take place on American soil. The case, however, did not achieve the | pyrotechnics of the crime. For five months, the jury members twisted in their leather swivel chairs while the government paraded 207 witnesses and more than 1,000 exhibits before them. Only once or twice did proceedings break the staid atmosphere, most notably when a prosecution witness, asked to identify two suspects, pointed to members of the jury.

Only at the end did it all come together. In a masterly six-hour summation, U.S. Attorney Henry DePippo crafted a cohesive argument out of the morass of evidence. Tracing the conspiracy back to April 1992, DePippo wove together phone calls, fingerprints, chemical analysis, chunks of metal and parking stubs into a narrative that led to the on-ramp of the B-2 parking level of the World Trade Center. Throughout the tale, he clearly delineated the roles of Mohammad Salameh, Nidal Ayyad, Mahmud Abouhalima and Ahmad Ajaj in the criminal partnership.

By the time of DePippo's summation, the four defense teams had broken ranks. During their cross-examinations of government witnesses, defense attorneys cooperated in raising doubts about each part of the prosecution's reconstruction in hopes of raising reasonable doubt about the overall story.

By the end, however, each defense lawyer was offering a distinct case for his client's acquittal. The government had built a case on "lies and deception," boomed Abouhalima's attorney in a closing argument that sounded more like a sermon. Ayyad's lawyer was less passionate, plodding through a four-hour summation that had the jurors nodding with fatigue. On one occasion, the judge fell into a deep sleep and had to be nudged awake by a court clerk.

Salameh's lawyer Robert Precht launched into a final argument that surprised his fellow attorneys. He argued that there had indeed been a plot but that his client had merely been the unwitting dupe of Ramzi Yousef, a fugitive who the government alleges was the mastermind of the conspiracy. Three days later, Salameh sent a letter to the judge saying, "I object to this summation, which I would never have agreed to had it been told me." Ajaj's lawyer immediately filed a mistrial motion claiming Precht "did more damage to Mr. Ajaj in the first six minutes of his summation than Mr. DePippo did in . . . six hours." Ajaj was in jail during the bombing and had been for six months before it happened. A defense admission of Yousef's involvement, however, fed into the prosecution's contention that Ajaj had helped Yousef get into the country to further his plot.

"The message of this verdict is twofold," said William Gavin, deputy assistant director of the FBI. "That terrorism has invaded the shores of the United States of America, and that you will be caught, prosecuted and may go to jail." The government hopes this shutout victory is a hint of what is to come. In the fall it faces what promises to be an even longer prosecution in the conspiracy case against Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman and 14 of his followers charged with plotting to blow up the U.N. and other targets in New York City. The bombing of the World Trade Center's Twin Towers is an element of that larger case, and the government also hopes to answer questions that were not found in the verdict last week: Was a larger organization behind this attack? Who ordered it? What was the motive?

But memories of the bombing have left a lingering wariness, especially against the backdrop of the trial and the massacre in Hebron. Early last week, after a van of Hasidic students in New York City was allegedly shot up by a Lebanese cabdriver, speculation spread that the deed had been part of an organized terrorist attack. At one point, the alleged gunman and two suspected accomplices were reported to be part of a terrorist ring under surveillance by both the FBI and Mossad, Israel's intelligence agency. That information proved to be false, but the fear of terrorism is now a real part of the American imagination.