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Student sentenced to 30 years for plot against Bush

A student from Virginia was sentenced on Wednesday to 30 years in prison for plotting with al-Qaeda operatives to assassinate US President George W. Bush and hijack planes.

Last November, a federal jury in Alexandria, Virginia, convicted the student, Ahmed Omar Abu Ali, 25, of numerous counts of conspiracy to commit acts of terrorism. The jurors rejected his claim that his captors beat and tortured him into confessing after his arrest in Saudi Arabia in 2003.

Judge Gerald Bruce Lee of US District Court in Alexandria could have sentenced Abu Ali to as few as 20 years in prison. The Justice Department, which saw his trial as an important test of its ability to use foreign intelligence sources for a criminal case in a US court, had argued for the maximum sentence, life in prison.

The department has described Abu Ali as "one of the most dangerous terrorist threats that America faces in the perilous world after Sept. 11, 2001: an al-Qaeda operative born and raised in the United States, trained and committed to carry out deadly attacks on American soil."

Abu Ali, who was born to a Jordanian father and grew up in the Washington suburb of Falls Church, Virginia, was arrested in June 2003 at a university in Medina, Saudi Arabia, when Saudi authorities were investigating a wave of bombings.

Abu Ali's lawyers have insisted that he was just a student who went to Saudi Arabia to pursue religious studies. They said they would appeal the conviction.

In other news, a 13-year-old Kentucky boy who officials originally said threatened Bush actually made the threat against a school, not the president, police said. Police Captain Linny Cloyd said Tuesday that the teen was being investigated for making threats against Bush, the city of Florence and a school in e-mails sent to the mayor. The teen has not been arrested.
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