Jury convicts five men of plotting against U.S. soldiers. A jury convicted five Muslim men Monday of plotting to kill American soldiers at For Dix military base in New Jersey last year. After six days of deliberation, the jury agreed with prosecutors that three brothers – Shain, Eljvir and Dritan Duka – and Mohamad Shnewer and Serdar Tatar were planning to attack Fort Dix and kill the base residents. However, the jury, while agreeing with the conspiracy charge, did not find them guilty of attempted murder. Among the evidence accumulated by the prosecution were hundreds of tape-recorded conversations between the defendants and FBI agents, several propagandist videos from one of the suspects’ computers, and video of an illegal purchase of several machine guns. The defense contended that the government informants were shaky and that the feds coaxed the defendants into making damning comments on government wiretaps. One of the informants is an Egyptian-born illegal immigrant on probation for bank fraud; the other has been paid about $150,000 by the Federal Bureau of Investigation for making the secret recording. The five men were arrested in May 2007 after one of the government’s informants secretly videotaped them paying $1,400 for seven machine guns in the informant’s apartment, in Cherry Hill, N.J.

U.S. missiles kill eight people in Afghanistan. U.S. missiles fired from an unmanned aircraft killed at least eight people in Afghanistan Monday, sparking anger among Pakistani authorities who argue that such actions are undermining their own strategy against terror, The Associated Press reports. Four of the deaths occurred when missiles slammed into a vehicle and a house. Four others died and one was injured in the second vehicle about five miles away by a dirt track. The U.S. military has launched than 30 missile strikes since August in Pakistan’s lawless, tribal areas, targeting al-Qaeda and Taliban militants blamed for attacks in Afghanistan.

TAGS: afghanistan, against, convicts, jury, kill, plotting, U.S. missiles, U.S. soldiers

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