Padilla on Trial, Five Years After Terror Arrest

Five years after he was arrested at Chicago's airport and whisked away to a navy jail to be held in solitary confinement, amid charges that he was trying to detonate a radioactive "dirty" bomb, Jose Padilla had his day in court yesterday.

In his long journey to the Miami courtroom, Mr Padilla, a former gang member and convert to Islam, has become a living symbol of the Bush administration's prosecution of the war on terrorism. He is the first US citizen designated an enemy combatant by the president to be allowed his day in an American criminal court.

No longer the terrorist mastermind of a plot to set off a dirty bomb on American soil, as described at the time of his arrest in May 2002, Mr Padilla went on trial along with two others on reduced charges of conspiring to murder and kidnap persons overseas, and of providing material support for terrorists.

He and two other accused, Adham Amin Hassoun and Kifah Wael Jayyousi, face no specific charges of committing violent acts. However, Mr Padilla, now 36, could still spent the rest of his life in prison if he is convicted of aiding Islamist extremists around the world.

The prosecution argued yesterday that the three men provided crucial support to al-Qaida. "The defendants were members of a secret organisation, a terrorism support cell, based right here in south Florida," the assistant US attorney, Brian Frazier, told the court. "The defendants took concrete steps to support and promote this violence."

All three plead not guilty.

Mr Padilla's fate could hinge on documents unearthed by the prosecution that suggest that following his conversion to Islam in the 1990s, he tried to join an al-Qaida camp in Afghanistan in 2000.

Mr Padilla's defence argues that his confinement in a navy brig off the coast of South Carolina amounted to torture.

During his first three years in custody, Mr Padilla was held without charge, stripped of legal rights that would otherwise have been afforded to a US citizen, as opposed to the foreign nationals detained at Guantánamo. He was transferred to the US criminal justice system in late 2005.

The prosecution is unlikely to use any information obtained under interrogation during his early days in detention for fear of exposing the interrogation methods and Mr Padilla's treatment while in military custody.

That has led to a far thinner dossier against him than it might have seemed at the time of his arrest, when Bush administration officials described Mr Padilla as the dirty bomber.