Terrorism suspect unlikely to face death penalty

By ROBERT VERKAIK and ROBERT FISK

The United States' desire to see Osama bin Laden sentenced to death in a federal court could be frustrated by international law.

Under international principles the maximum punishment for crimes against humanity is life imprisonment. But it is already clear that American public opinion will settle for nothing less than the death penalty, as meted out to Timothy McVeigh for the Oklahoma bombing.

The clamour for American-style justice will be intense, yet the Government has already raised expectations that terrorism is an international problem requiring an international solution.

Right from the start President George W. Bush made it clear that last week's terrorist acts were not just an attack on America but an assault on the civilised world. People of many nationalities perished inside the World Trade Center towers.

International criminal lawyers believe the most suitable forum to prosecute terrorists is the International Criminal Court, set to be created under a 1998 treaty signed in Rome.

But the United States has yet to ratify the treaty, which is still a dozen or so countries short of the 60 required signatories.

Mr Bush and his Administration have been undermining attempts to achieve a US ratification.

It may still be possible to set up a one-off court such as the Scottish Bench that tried the Libyans accused of the Lockerbie bombing.

Another possibility, apparently being considered by the White House, is some sort of military tribunal, giving the accused fewer constitutional rights than they would have in an ordinary court.

All of the legal ramifications, though, are nothing if the US cannot prove it has evidence against bin Laden.

The Government says it has a mountain of evidence linking him to the devastating attack, but it remains, almost certainly, a largely circumstantial case.

Bin Laden's organisation is not the sort that allows itself to be linked to anything so crude as a smoking gun, and investigators hold out little or no hope of finding a wiretap of bin Laden issuing specific instructions, or a signed list of written commands.

What emerges instead is a tangled web of contacts, connections and semi-autonomous cells stretching around the globe.

Some of this web plugs directly into the teams of four or five men believed to have hijacked the four jets for last week's attacks.

Some of it merely confirms a pattern established by past operations and attempted attacks ascribed to bin Laden's al Qaeda group.

This is not what a prosecutor would call an open-and-shut case.

The name of the Saudi-born construction magnate's son surfaced quickly because, as intelligence experts point out, nobody else has the money, the organisation, ideological imperative, fanatical following and the guts to pull off something like this.

But how are the hijackers connected to bin Laden?

At most, they would have trained at one of his camps in Afghanistan. There may have been some internet communication, but the chances are that the only direct contact with bin Laden was secret and via go-betweens who did not take part in the hijackings.

Said an FBI bureau chief last week: "They [the network] are almost impossible to catch and monitor."

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