Hoping to avoid a life sentence in prison, one of two Bowling Green Iraqi refugees set to be sentenced Tuesday for attempting to send weapons and cash to al-Qaeda in Iraq is alleging he was entrapped in a U.S. government scheme.
The Louisville Courier-Journal is reporting a lawyer for Mohanad Shareef Hammadi cites a study of more than 500 terrorism prosecutions since 9/11 that found an FBI informant led more than one-third of the plots and provided all the necessary weapons, money and transportation.
In a sentencing memorandum, Hammadi's court appointed lawyer James Earhart says his client was unemployed and had no money, weapons of means of transporting them when he was recruited by a confidential government informant.
In the first terrorism case in Kentucky, Hammadi and co-defendant Waad Ramadan Alwan are to be sentenced in Bowling Green by Senior U.S. District Court Judge Thomas B. Russell. Both men pleaded guilty to attempting to provide material support to a foreign terrorist organization and lying about their backgrounds.
They were arrested in 2011 after they agreed to help a government informant load cash and weapons into a tractor-trailer they believed was destined for al-Qaeda in Iraq.