GEOFF MULVIHILL, Camden, New Jersey
AN Albanian man born in Kosovo yesterday admitted conspiring to provide weapons to a group of men accused of plotting to attack the Fort Dix US Army base in New Jersey.
Agron Abdullahu faces up to five years in prison when he is sentenced on February 6. Since his arrest, he has been held in isolation at a detention centre in Philadelphia.
Prosecutors have portrayed Abdullahu, 25, a bakery worker, as having the smallest role among the six men arrested earlier this year in the Fort Dix case. Abdullahu was charged only with weapons offences.
The others - three Albanians from the former Yugoslavia, a Jordanian and a Turk - are charged with conspiring to kill military personnel, a crime punishable by life in prison.
Abdullahu was charged with providing weapons to illegal immigrants and has admitted letting illegal immigrants use weapons he owned legally, including a pistol and a semiautomatic rifle. The plot to kill troops at the base was not mentioned during the hearing.
His defence counsel, Richard Coughlin, said after the hearing that Abdullahu had no information about any terror plot and if a plot were found to have existed, his client had no role in it.
The authorities said that while Abdullahu provided weapons to the other men and joined them for target practice in Pennsylvania, he resisted the idea of participating in an attack. The government said he told the others at one point that it would be against Islam to kill civilians and that it would be "crazy" to attack the military installation.
The FBI was tipped off when a shopkeeper alerted agents about a video he had been asked to copy on to a DVD. The video showed men "shooting assault weapons at a firing range ... while calling for jihad and shouting praises to God in Arabic", the complaint said.
The other five suspects - Albanian brothers Dritan, Shain and Eljvir Duka; Jordanian Mohamad Ibrahim Shnewer; and Serdar Tatar, a Turk - have pleaded not guilty and are due to go on trial in January.
Coughlin said Abdullahu will probably get two to three years and could later face deportation. AP
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