Lynne Stewart trial update, from AP, with thanks to None:
NEW YORK — A lawyer and two co-defendants helped an imprisoned Egyptian sheik commit a sort of “jailbreak” by allowing him to get around prison rules and feed messages to terrorists overseas, a prosecutor told a federal jury Wednesday.
In his closing argument, assistant U.S. attorney Andrew Dember asked the jury to convict the three of a conspiracy to overcome the government’s effort to silence the still “powerful and influential” prisoner, Omar Abdel-Rahman.
Civil rights lawyer Lynne Stewart and her co-defendants, Ahmed Abdel Sattar and Mohamed Yousry, testified they obeyed the law in the work they did for Abdel-Rahman.
The blind sheik, who entered the United States in 1990, is serving a life prison sentence for his 1995 conviction for inspiring plots to assassinate Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and blow up New York City landmarks.
Dember told jurors the three defendants in effect “broke Abdel-Rahman out of jail, made him available to the worst kind of criminal we find in this world — terrorists.”