After years of secrecy, terrorist to appear in NY courtroom

By JERUSALEM POST STAFF
An al-Qaida member who secretly pleaded guilty more than five years ago to planning bomb attacks on American embassies will emerge from the shadows Friday to receive a lengthy prison sentence. Mohammed Mansour Jabarah, 26, will face a likely sentence of life in prison for a brief career in terror that included training with Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan and unsuccessfully plotting to bomb embassies in the Philippines and Singapore, prosecutors said in court papers. The Canadian citizen's appearance in a Manhattan courtroom will be his first time in public since his detention in 2002, and Thursday marked the first time in which the court system made public any details of his case, which has been under seal since his arrest. Jabarah initially was working as a government informant when he was brought to the US from Canada in 2002 after his capture in Jordan. He pleaded guilty to the terror charges that summer in a secret proceeding without mounting a defense and briefly lived in an FBI-arranged housing facility rather than a prison while he worked as a collaborator.