Verdict Expected In Fort Dix Terror Case: UPDATE: Guilty

A verdict is expected to be handed down shortly in the Fort Dix terror case. The jurors have been deliberating for five days, and expected to have a verdict in sometime today.

The defendants are charged with plotting to carry out a terrorist attack against the Fort Dix military installation.

Prosecutors say the defendants conspired to kill U.S. military members, either at Fort Dix or another target, and sought weapons to carry out the strike. The evidence at the eight-week trial suggested the men watched Al Qaeda videos, listened to jihadist lectures, and trained with rifles and horses during an excursion to the Pocono Mountains.

They were arrested in May 2007, after a 15-month investigation that ended when two suspects tried to buy weapons from an FBI informant.

Charged with conspiracy and attempted murder are brothers Eljvir, Dritan and Shain Duka, ethnic Albanians who worked at a family roofing business; Mohamad Shnewer, a Jordanian who drove a cab and worked at his family's market in Pennsauken; and Serdar Tatar, a native of Turkey who was an assistant manager at a Philadelphia 7-Eleven.

Each faces up to life in prison if convicted on the conspiracy charge.

Attorneys for the defendants, who became friends at a Cherry Hill high school, said there was no conspiracy. They said the Pocono trip was a vacation, replete with pillow fights, and argued that the informants concocted and encouraged the plot because they were being paid by the FBI or promised legal immigration status.

UPDATE:
All five remaining defendants were found guilty of terrorism related charges although they were found not guilty on attempted murder charges. Guilty verdicts on charges of conspiracy to kill US soldiers at Fort Dix means that the five are looking at life in prison.

UPDATE:
The jurors included a note showing the burden that the jurors felt with going through the charges. Sentencing is set for April 22-23.

The Fort Dix probe began in January 2006 when an electronics store clerk in South Jersey gave police a copy of a customer's videotape that showed the men firing rifles and shouting Islamic battle cries. FBI agents and two paid cooperators then spent 15 months shadowing the suspects, recording their conversations and examining their computers.

The evidence indicated that the men gathered weekly at a Palmyra mosque and regularly watched and discussed Al Qaeda videos extolling jihads and depicting deadly attacks against U.S. forces. In January 2006 and February 2007, they rented a house in the Pocono Mountains, where investigators said they trained for an attack by riding horses, shooting weapons at a rifle range and playing war games with paintball.

Prosecutors conceded the men had not settled on a target or a timetable for their strike, but called them "radical Islamists" with a shared goal: a jihad to kill American troops. They played for jurors hidden videos of the lead defendant, Shnewer, traveling with an FBI informant to Fort Dix, Dover Air Force Base and other sites in August 2006.

But for an alert Circuit City store clerk, this plot would have continued unknown until these terrorists managed get caught or carried out the attacks.