Al-Qaida aide gets 32 years for stabbing guard in eye

NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
NEW YORK -- A judge threw an ailing former prison guard out of a Manhattan courtroom Monday moments before throwing the book at the Al-Qaida loyalist who stabbed the guard through the eye with a sharpened comb during an attempted jailbreak.
Overcome by rage, Louis Pepe brandished a black comb like the one Mamdouh Mahmud Salim plunged through his eye into his brain Nov. 1, 2000, during an attempted escape from the Metropolitan Correctional Center in lower Manhattan.
Pepe screamed from his wheelchair at the terror suspect and finally was ordered out of the courtroom -- but won a show of support from dozens of fellow officers who marched out behind him.
"I'm dead! You understand that? I'm dead, dead, dead!" Pepe, 46, shouted at Manhattan Federal Judge Deborah Batts. "Have a nice day! Bye!"
Even Salim -- a reputed top aide of Osama Bin Laden -- interrupted the hearing to plead with the judge to let Pepe stay. "Please let him speak," the suspect called out. "He has his right to speak."
Moments after she booted Pepe, Batts also tossed out federal sentencing guidelines, because of the cruelty of the comb attack, and sentenced Salim to 32 years -- 10 years more than the maximum.
"The cold immediacy of the precision with which he plunged the sharpened weapon deep into the eye of the downed man is appalling," she said.
Salim, 46, who still faces trial in the 1998 bombings of two U.S. embassies in East Africa, buried his face in his hands.
Earlier, Pepe, who is partially paralyzed and suffers from brain damage, struggled to recount how Salim and an accomplice stabbed him with the shank after squirting him in the eye with Tabasco sauce.
"They hit me again, and they hit me again," Pepe said, referring to his attackers' attempt to get his jail keys. "Guess what I did? I said, 'No.'"