Feds rest terror case against ex-Tech student

Federal prosecutors rested their case Wednesday against Syed Haris Ahmed, a former Georgia Tech student on trial for conspiring to support terrorism here and overseas.

Ahmed, 24, waived his right to a jury trial so he can give closing arguments to U.S. District Judge Bill Duffey, who is presiding as judge and jury. Duffey said this week he will issue a written order explaining his verdict after he is finished deliberating.

If convicted, Ahmed faces up to 15 years in prison. He has said his closing arguments, expected to be given Thursday, will be “the message of Islam.”

On Wednesday, prosecutors introduced into evidence an e-mail Ahmed wrote on March 21, 2006, to Ehsanul Islam Sadequee of Roswell, who will be tried in August for his alleged role in the terrorism conspiracy.

Three days before he sent the e-mail, Ahmed had given one of several interviews to counterterrorism agents. They told Ahmed not to contact Sadequee, who was then in Bangladesh. But Ahmed drove to the Dawson County library, got on a computer and typed a message to Sadequee using Daveymore1126 as his Yahoo France e-mail address.

“The dogs came to me,” Ahmed wrote his friend. “This time they were not usual. They had done their homework.”

Ahmed told Sadequee the agents knew about their trip to Canada where they met with individuals and discussed terrorist acts and their trip to Washington where they took “casing videos” of area landmarks.

Ahmed also said he had told the agents about their planned “Mother’s Day and picnic” in “curry land,” meaning their plans to meet in Pakistan and go to a military training camp.

Ahmed said after he made the “initial blunder” of disclosing this to the agents, it was all “damage control” after that.

“Basically I told them which is true to the best of my knowledge that we were kids who got just excited,” Ahmed wrote to Sadequee.

He warned Sadequee not to come to “Pharoah land” — the United States — anytime soon.

Soon after FBI agents learned that Ahmed had contacted Sadequee, they called him into agency headquarters and placed him under arrest. Ahmed has been held in solitary confinement the past three years awaiting his trial, which is expected to wrap up on Thursday.