Defense Attorneys for accused terrorist Ahmed Ghailani say their client was a “dupe” but not responsible for the 1998 Al Qaeda attacks on the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.

Ghailani is the first Guantanamo Bay detainee to be tried in a civilian court. He is charged with 286 counts including murder and attempted use of a weapon of mass destruction. In his opening statement to jurors, Defense Attorney Steve Zissou  described Ghailani as someone anxious to please older friends and associates who treated him as “ little brother.”

Zissou told jurors that Al Qaeda members who Ghailani knew “used him” to implement their evil plot, but claim Ghailani had no idea what was taking place.  According to Zissou “he was with them, but he was not one of them.“ Zissou described Ghailani as being “not really a man, but a boy” who played with children and watched cartoons in the days leading up to the twin attacks that left 224 people dead.

Prosecutor Nicholas Lewin said Ghailani was an Al Qaeda member who knowingly helped purchase the components to make the lethal bomb that exploded outside the US Embassy in Dar Es Salaam. He said Ghailani paid cash for 20 tanks filled with explosives.  The prosecutor in his opening statement said evidence would show clothing in Ghailani’s home contained explosive residue.

Last week Judge Lewis Kaplan excluded a key government witness in the case who was expected to directly link Ghailani to the terror plot.

The first witness to testify in the trial was the former the  US Embassy’s Acting Ambassador in Tanzania, John Lange, who described the scene after the attack as resembling “ a disaster area.”  Moments after the explosion he said he left his office and found a man’s badly charred body. He said the victim was “in the last gasps of life.”