A U.S. federal court judge in Miami on Friday sentenced Narseal Batiste, the alleged ringleader of a terror plot to blow up the Sears Tower in Chicago, to 13 years in prison.
Narseal Batiste was convicted along with four others in May for plotting with the al-Qaeda to blow up the Sears tower in Chicago and carry out attacks on several other buildings in the U.S., including FBI offices.
Batiste was convicted of conspiring to provide material support to a foreign terrorist organization; provide material support to terrorists; destroy buildings with explosives; and levy war against the U.S. government in a seditious act, while the other four were convicted on two material support counts.
Batiste's co-defendants in the case, namely Patrick Abraham, Stanley Grant Phanor, Rotschild Augustine and Burson Augustin, were sentenced to prison terms ranging from six to ten years. They were convicted on two material support counts.
The group was convicted in May after the jury reached its verdict on the third trial of the so-called "Liberty City Six" after the first two trials ended in mistrials, with the previous juries failing to decide whether the plot was genuine. A sixth member of the group was acquitted in May, while a seventh was acquitted in the first trial.
They were arrested in June 2006 in a FBI raid on a warehouse, where Batiste allegedly trained his radical followers to carry out attacks on government offices and other buildings. Their arrests followed an FBI investigation into a suspected domestic terror plot, targeting Chicago and other major cities across the United States including Miami and New York.
Prosecutors had demanded the maximum 70-year sentence for Batiste, but his lawyers argued that the plot was never serious. They blamed the FBI investigators of using a paid informant posing as an al-Qaeda operative for trapping Batiste and the other group members.
The FBI case was built on recordings of meetings between Batiste and the paid FBI informant posing as an al-Qaeda operative. Batiste has insisted that he went along with the plot to collect the $50,000 offered by the FBI informant.
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