An Egyptian man was sentenced to 25 years in a US prison Friday for conspiring to kill Americans in the 1998 embassy bombings in Africa, which left 224 people dead.
Adel Abdel Bary — who was extradited to the United States from Britain in 2012 — pleaded guilty last September on three counts of working for Al-Qaeda and Egyptian Islamic Jihad.
In 1997 and 1998, Bary headed up the London cell of Egyptian Islamic Jihad — then led by Ayman al-Zawahiri, who is now head of Al-Qaeda — and the two groups essentially merged.
Bary passed to journalists Al-Qaeda’s claim of responsibility for the bombings of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, which left more than 5,000 others wounded.
He also passed on threats of future Al-Qaeda attacks that were sent from London to media organizations in France, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates the day after the embassy bombings.
The August 7, 1998 car bombing of the US embassy in Nairobi killed 213 people and wounded another 5,000.
A near simultaneous truck bomb outside the US mission in Tanzania killed 11 people and wounded 70 more.
Federal judge Lewis Kaplan told Bary that the sentence would allow him to return to his family and live out the remainder of his life in freedom, a privilege not extended to his victims.
Bary has already spent 16 years in British and US custody.
“I would like to say I feel sorry for all the victims,” he told the judge, speaking through a translator.
“If I could just do something to bring the victims back, I would,” he added.
Bary’s son, former London rapper Abdel-Majed Abdel Bary, is now believed to have joined extremists fighting in Syria.
By pleading guilty, Bary avoided spending the rest of his life behind bars.
His alleged co-conspirator — Saudi exile Khalid al-Fawwaz, the purported chief of the London Al-Qaeda cell — is currently on trial in New York.
A third co-conspirator, Libyan defendant Abu Anas al-Libi, died in custody last month from natural causes.
Source : reuters
