Prosecutors Challenge Credibility of Translator

In four days of cross-examination, a federal prosecutor chipped away at the credibility of an Arabic translator on trial in a terrorist conspiracy case along with Lynne F. Stewart, a defense lawyer. But the prosecutor did not link the translator, Mohamed Yousry, directly to any terrorist act or even to any threat of violence.

With her questions, the prosecutor, Robin L. Baker, succeeded in revealing inconsistencies in Mr. Yousry’s claims about his academic studies and accomplishments on various résumés he wrote in the mid-1990’s. She exposed inconsistencies between his testimony at the trial, in Federal District Court in Manhattan, and views he expressed in drafts of a doctoral thesis about Islamic militants.

Yesterday, Ms. Baker also showed that Mr. Yousry had been less than forthcoming in an interview with two F.B.I. agents who showed up at his home in Elmhurst, Queens, two days after the Sept. 11 attacks. Ms. Baker presented the agents’ report on that visit as evidence in the trial.

But she offered no evidence that Mr. Yousry had played a role in any violent action by the Egyptian Muslim fundamentalists whose one-time terror campaign against their government is at the center of the case. She made few arguments to assail Mr. Yousry’s main line of defense: that he was following instructions from Ms. Stewart and other lawyers in the case throughout his dealings with Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, a client of Ms. Stewart’s.

The sheik is serving a life sentence in federal prison for inspiring a thwarted 1993 plot to bomb tunnels and buildings in New York. Ms. Stewart, who represented him at his 1995 trial, is accused of aiding terrorism by helping the sheik to convey a call for war from his prison cell to his followers in the Islamic Group, a militant organization in Egypt. Mr. Yousry is charged with conspiring with Ms. Stewart in what prosecutors have charged was a “jailbreak” of the sheik’s message of violence.

Under questioning by Ms. Baker, Mr. Yousry admitted that he had not told the two F.B.I. agents everything that he had told the sheik, in telephone calls and prison meetings, about the bombing in October 2000 of the Cole, an American warship that was attacked in a port in Yemen. Secret government recordings of those encounters have revealed that Mr. Yousry discussed the bombing with the sheik, telling him that a paralegal in the case had received a phone call from someone in the Middle East claiming that the bombing had been carried out in the sheik’s name. The paralegal, a Staten Island postal worker, Ahmed Abdel Sattar, is also a defendant in the trial.

Questioned later by one of his defense lawyers, David A. Ruhnke, Mr. Yousry said he “did not trust” the agents when they first appeared at his home. “I was very concerned about the climate in the country” in the days after 9/11, he said. “I’m an Arab-American who works for lawyers who work with a major Islamic figure” who had been linked to the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, he said.

Mr. Yousry testified that he called the agents back two days later to tell them about the phone call Mr. Sattar had received and report that he had mentioned it to the sheik. After that, Mr. Yousry had regular conversations with the F.B.I., Mr. Ruhnke said, that ended in February 2002, just a few weeks before his arrest.

The last witness in Mr. Yousry’s defense was his daughter Leslie Yousry Davis, who testified that her father was not religious and had never shown any interest in Muslim fundamentalism. As she testified, Mr. Yousry, who has maintained an even manner on the stand, raised both palms to his eyes to stop his tears.

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