22-Year Term for Nigerian Who Joined Al Qaeda and Then Denounced It

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From one perspective, Lawal Babafemi was a propagandist for Al Qaeda who traversed several countries to join in jihad, and was plotting to carry out an important mission when he was arrested in 2011.

From another, he was a desperately poor Nigerian who was sexually abused as a child, was kept from graduating from college because of bureaucratic malfunctions, and faced torture by Nigerian officials after embracing and then turning away from terrorism.

On Wednesday, Mr. Babafemi was sentenced to 22 years in prison in Federal District Court in Brooklyn, having pleaded guilty in April 2014 to providing and conspiring to provide material support to a terrorist group. Federal sentencing guidelines called for a term of 24 to 30 years; the defense had asked for 15.

Mr. Babafemi told Judge John Gleeson that he was “extremely sorry” and that he now denounced Al Qaeda. His lawyer, Lisa Hoyes, noted that he had been advising another of her clients — who is in jail on charges of trying to join ISIS — to avoid terrorism.

“It’s hard to conjure a more serious offense,” Judge Gleeson said in handing down the sentence. He noted, however, that Mr. Babafemi’s recent denunciations of terrorism factored slightly in his favor. “I wish I had a better feel for how genuine it is,” the judge added.

Mr. Babafemi, about 35, was born in Nigeria. When he was 2, his parents separated — his father had several wives, Mr. Babafemi said in a letter to the judge. After that, he saw his father only three more times.

His mother hauled timber to a sawmill six days a week to support him and his four siblings, and “there were many cases of people dying in this forest due to the attack from the wild animals,” Mr. Babafemi wrote.

Mr. Babafemi was often left in day care or watched by older family members, and he was sexually abused by some of them until he was 10, according to a sentencing memorandum filed by Ms. Hoyes.

In Lagos, violent student groups known as cults shut down his college’s operations. After an identification mix-up, he had to repeat his first-year courses, and professors said they lost exams, so he did not get credit for some classes. Mr. Babafemi did not graduate despite paying for and attending for six years.

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He married a childhood friend, a woman named Nike, in 2007, and tried to start a fish-farming business. Suppliers, however, lied to him about the species they sold, and power failures made maintaining fresh water for the fish impossible, the memorandum said.

Nike had a stillborn baby and several miscarriages before delivering two children.

In 2010, Mr. Babafemi went to Yemen, apparently wanting to join Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. He did not explain why.

Zainab Ahmad, an assistant United States attorney, said at the sentencing that Mr. Babafemi could have joined terrorist groups closer to home, but instead joined a group that was targeting the United States.

Mr. Babafemi’s first trip to Yemen was cut short when he was deported to Nigeria. He returned to Yemen in January 2011.

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On that trip, Ms. Ahmad said in her sentencing memorandum, he went to a safe house and pledged loyalty to Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. He met other foreign fighters, including Minh Quang Pham, a former British citizen who is being prosecuted in Federal District Court in Manhattan on charges that he supported terrorism, and Samir Khan, an American who headed the group’s English-language media arm.

Mr. Babafemi wrote and edited for Inspire magazine, an English-language propaganda publication, and “wrote English rap lyrics about jihad” as part of an effort to spread the Qaeda branch’s views through songs, prosecutors said. He also received weapons training.

Soon, Ms. Ahmad wrote, Mr. Babafemi became close with Anwar al-Awlaki, an American who was a senior leader in the group and a top propagandist. They held “multiple one-on-one meetings.” (Mr. Awlaki and Mr. Khan have since been killed by United States attacks.)

According to statements Mr. Babafemi gave United States authorities, Mr. Awlaki directed him to go back to Nigeria and recruit other members.

Ms. Hoyes, Mr. Babafemi’s lawyer, wrote that he was eager to leave Al Qaeda by that point. In 2011, instead of going to Nigeria as he was supposed to, he went to Saudi Arabia to work in construction. He was quickly deported, and returned to Nigeria in June 2011.

He “feared Al Qaeda’s reach in Nigeria” and tried to recruit a friend and an imam to join, but they resisted, Ms. Hoyes wrote. Mr. Babafemi then tried to get into the used-car business.

Ms. Ahmad, the prosecutor, argued in court that it was unlikely that Mr. Awlaki, by then among “the most hunted” Qaeda members in the world, would let someone he did not trust, with inside information about the group’s operations, go off on his own.

At the same time, Ms. Ahmad noted in her papers, Al Qaeda sent Minh Pham home to Britain, where he was arrested with a round of assault-rifle ammunition. Mr. Babafemi, she argued, was sent to Nigeria with a mission that was bigger than recruiting a few new members. She did not specify what that mission was.

Whatever the circumstances, Mr. Babafemi had only two more months of freedom. In August 2011, when his daughter was 7 months old and his son about 2, he jumped with them on the bed. “She couldn’t help but keep laughing and my son kept laughing at the two of us,” he wrote to the judge. “That was the last time I would be seeing their faces again.”

The next day, he was arrested by Nigerian authorities, and a neighbor “saw five men with guns dragging my husband into their car,” his wife wrote to the judge.

The Nigerian State Security Service, overseen by someone called the “Chairman,” Ms. Hoyes wrote, beat him with wire cables, shocked and bound him. He was “chained to a gate in a hallway for nearly an entire month,” naked except for a hood. “He was told, falsely, that his mother, wife and infant daughter were being held in prison.”

A clinician for Bellevue Hospital Center in Manhattan who specializes in torture found his account “credible,” the defense memorandum said.

Ms. Ahmad said in her papers that Nigerian authorities said Mr. Babafemi was not tortured, but she agreed that the Nigerian imprisonment did not meet United States standards, so a “modest” reduction in his sentence was appropriate as a result.

He consented to be extradited to the United States in 2013.

No family members were present at Mr. Babafemi’s sentencing. Ms. Hoyes said Mr. Babafemi rarely talks to them. Her sentencing memorandum notes that international phone calls from prison cost $1 a minute, and Mr. Babafemi earns only $19.20 a month in the prison kitchen

(NY TIMES)