Agent IDs taped voice as terror suspect’s

MIAMI —  An FBI agent who interrogated terrorism suspect Jose Padilla on the night of his May 2002 arrest in Chicago testified Wednesday that he could identify the defendant’s voice on wiretapped phone calls.

“There’s no doubt in my mind that the voice of Jose Padilla is on these tapes,” Special Agent Russell R. Fincher of the FBI’s New York bureau told the jury in U.S. District Judge Marcia Cooke’s courtroom.

Fincher made the statement even though he had no recording of the 5-year-old interview to compare with the wiretap calls.

The agent wasn’t allowed to say why he was so sure: He also interrogated Padilla during the defendant’s 3 1/2 years in detention as an enemy combatant at the Navy brig in Charleston, S.C.

The federal government is prosecuting Padilla and two codefendants on charges of conspiracy to murder, maim or kidnap people abroad and of providing material support to terrorists.

When Padilla was arrested at O’Hare International Airport on May 8, 2002, he was accused of plotting to detonate a radioactive dirty bomb or blow up apartments in a U.S. city. But those accusations were dropped when the government transferred him from military custody to federal court in November 2005.

Cooke ruled in pretrial hearings that nothing about Padilla’s detention by the Pentagon -- neither self-incriminating testimony he reportedly gave his interrogators nor descriptions of the isolation and abuse he was allegedly subjected to in the brig -- was relevant to the civilian case over which she is presiding.

A January 2006 indictment that added Padilla to the federal case against Adham Amin Hassoun and Kifah Wael Jayyousi alleged that the foreign-born codefendants, both 45, recruited Padilla and others to fight enemies of Islam and financed their terrorist training.

But keeping the more inflammatory “dirty bomber” accusations out of the current trial has been a challenge for the defense and prosecution.

Fincher’s assurances to the jury that he could identify Padilla’s voice in the Arabic-language recordings probably would have been more convincing if he could have mentioned the frequency and duration of conversations with Padilla recorded after his arrest.

A convicted felon expected to testify for the prosecution today about contact with Padilla at a South Florida mosque in the late 1990s will first be questioned outside the presence of the jury to ensure that he doesn’t mention any of the topics prohibited by Cooke, including Padilla’s criminal record and the dirty-bomb allegations.

Inclusion of Padilla -- now 36 -- in the case against Hassoun and Jayyousi also threatens to “contaminate” the others’ defenses, their lawyers have argued repeatedly.

The felon who offered information about Padilla from their mutual attendance at the Sunrise mosque apparently learned of Hassoun’s role there in the course of being interviewed by FBI agents in a Georgia jail. The government now wants to question him before the jury about Hassoun as well.

Prosecutors are also expected to begin playing recordings of hundreds of intercepted phone calls today, providing the first evidence of a link between Padilla and his codefendants.

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carol.williams@latimes.com