Dad says son’s trip was for business

The son wanted to open a computer store in Jordan, his father testified.

TOLEDO (AP) — Just months before his arrest, a man accused of plotting to kill American soldiers in Iraq traveled to see his family in Jordan along with an informant working with the FBI, the man’s father testified Tuesday.

Mohammad Amawi was planning to move back to the country, open a computer business and get married, his father said.

Amawi, Wassim Mazloum and Marwan El-Hindi are charged with conspiring to kill or maim people outside the United States. They were arrested in February 2006 and face a maximum penalty of life in prison if convicted.

El-Hindi’s attorneys said Tuesday they would not call any witnesses, and Mazloum finished his defense after his mother testified about his upbringing in Lebanon under the threat of war.

Zaki Amawi, testifying by video conference from Jordan, said his son and undercover informant Darren Griffin traveled to Jordan twice in 2005, the last trip coming in December.

During their first trip in August 2005, Griffin stayed with Amawi’s family, ate meals with them and brought gifts, including a cell phone.

“We treated him as he was one of the family,” said Zaki Amawi, who spoke through an interpreter. At times, he dabbed away tears while talking about his son.

Griffin secretly recorded the defendants at their homes, when they ate together and when they practiced shooting guns. He testified that as far as he knew, the three defendants never trained together and did that individually with him.

Zaki Amawi said his son, who was engaged to an Egyptian woman, told him he was planning to open a computer-related business in Jordan and that they had traveled to a similar store together.

Griffin testified earlier during the trial that Amawi told him that they were going to Jordan to deliver computers to a contact he had there.

Griffin, who paid for the trip, acknowledged that no delivery was made, and defense attorneys suggested that Amawi made up the story so he could get a free trip to visit his family.

Zaki Amawi was an engineer in the Jordanian Army and was a training officer in the United States when his son, Mohammad, was born in 1980 at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, a military hospital that now treats soldiers wounded in Iraq.

Amawi said he encouraged his son to stay in the U.S. when he was 18, saying he would have a better life there. One heated exchange between the two ended with the father breaking a few plates in anger.

Mohammad Amawi wanted to return to Jordan, and he lived there about a year in 1999 before returning to the U.S. He lived in Houston for a while and then moved to Toledo to attend college.

Zaki Amawi was twice deported from the U.S. because he entered the country illegally. He was sent back to Jordan in December 2001 and told he could not return for 20 years.

While in the U.S. the last time, he said he lived with his son in Toledo and that they enjoyed playing video games together.

Under questioning by federal prosecutor Gregg Sofer, Amawi said he saw his son watch videos of American soldiers being killed and the beheadings of contract workers.

Amawi and El-Hindi are U.S. citizens, and Mazloum came to the U.S. legally from Lebanon. El-Hindi was born in Jordan. Amawi also has Jordanian citizenship.