Bin Laden’s son-in-law found guilty of US terror charges

The man, 48-year-old cleric Sulaiman Abu Ghaith, now faces a maximum sentence of life in prison.

Federal prosecutors for the United States government argued at trial that Ghaith worked within the top ranks of the terror group and assumed the role of a spokesman of sorts, appearing in propaganda videotapes released in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks orchestrated by Al-Qaeda.

Ghaith admitted on trial to being summoned personally by bin Laden in June of 2011, and later took the Al-Qaeda leader’s daughter as an additional wife several years after 9/11. In the interim he appeared in videos released by the organization, including one where he warned Americans that “the storm of airplanes will not abate.”

‘‘The defendant committed himself to Al-Qaeda’s conspiracy to kill Americans, and he worked to drive other people to that conspiracy,” Assistant US Attorney John Cronan said during closing arguments on Monday, the Boston Globe reported.

Ghaith “literally sat at Osama bin Laden’s right hand,” Cronan said, according to the New York Times.

After five hours of deliberating that began a day earlier, on Wednesday morning the jury found Ghaith guilty of all three counts presented by the prosecution: conspiring to kill Americans, providing material support to terrorists and conspiring to provide that support. The two lesser of the accounts carried only a maximum of 15 years in prison each, but a conviction with regards to conspiring to kill Americans now opens the possibility for Ghaith to spend the rest of his life in confinement. He has not yet been sentenced.

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