Nur was one of four Caribbean men charged in connection with the plot that was hatched by Guyana-born US citizen Russell Defreitas in January 2006.NEW YORK, United States, – Despite his lawyer pleading with a judge not to impose a maximum sentence as it would amount to a death sentence for Abdel Nur who was suffering from cancer, the Guyanese man yesterday received the harshest penalty possible for his part in a failed plot to blow up the John F Kennedy (JFK) International Airport in New York.
US District Judge Dora Irizarry described the 61-year-old as "a dangerous person", as she imposed the 15-year sentence on him, seven months after he admitted that he provided 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,” the judge told him as she delivered her judgment.
Nur’s lawyer, Daniel Nobel, had asked Irizarry for a shorter sentence, noting that his client had lung cancer and the maximum sentence would therefore be a death sentence. However, she instead advised the defence attorney that an application for Nur’s release from prison could be made if it was determined that his death from illness was imminent.
Nur was one of four Caribbean men charged in connection with the plot that was hatched by Guyana-born US citizen Russell Defreitas in January 2006. Defreitas, a former cargo handler at JFK International Airport, and another Guyanese Abdul Kadir, who had been a politician in his home country for decades and served as mayor of the second largest city Linden, were found guilty last August after a one-month trial that Nur avoided by pleading guilty a day before it began.
Kadir was sentenced to life in prison while Defreitas is scheduled to be sentenced on February 17. The fourth defendant, Trinidadian Kareem Ibrahim, will have a separate trial in April, granted because of a medical condition.
Their plan had been to detonate fuel tanks and the fuel pipeline under the airport. But the plot was foiled in the planning stages with the aid of a US government informant.
Prosecutors presented evidence that Nur provided material support to the plot by attempting to locate al Qaeda explosives expert Adnan Gulshair el Shukrijumah, and by introducing the plotters and presenting the plot to Yasin Abu Bakr, leader of the militant Muslim group, Jamaat Al Muslimeen that had tried to overthrow the Trinidad and Tobago government in 1990.
They said that mastermind Defreitas had recruited the others to join his plot during multiple trips to Guyana and Trinidad.
Nur’s defence lawyer contended that his client was never a driving force in the plot and was mostly a “lackadaisical participant who provided minimal and ineffectual material assistance.”
Nobel also argued that his client had taken part in the plot for financial and not ideological reasons, submitting that Nur “lived on the economic fringes” of a developing country.
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