Budiman helped man linked to Osama

Budiman helped man linked to Osama

Mark Wilkinson, Reuters, Alexandria, Virginia

An Indonesian man suspected of having ties to the hijackers
who carried out the Sept. 11 attacks pleaded guilty on Monday to
helping a man linked to Osama bin Laden get a driver's license in
Virginia.

Agus Budiman, 31, appeared in U.S. District Court in
Alexandria and pleaded guilty to a single count of document
fraud. Budiman is slated to be sentenced on April 26 and likely
will face deportation to Indonesia after he is released from
prison.

Budiman was arrested in late October after the U.S. government
said he had "direct and troubling ties" to accused hijackers
Mohammad Atta and Zaid Samir Jarrah.

In a plea agreement, Budiman admitted that he helped Mohammad
Bin Nasser Belfas obtain a false Virginia driver's license.
Prosecutors have said Belfas has ties to bin Laden, the Saudi-
born extremist who heads the al-Qaeda guerrilla network and is
accused by the United States of masterminding the Sept. 11
attacks on New York and Washington.

"I plead guilty, sir," Budiman, wearing a green prisoner's
jumpsuit, quietly told Judge Gerald Lee.

As part of the plea agreement, prosecutors dropped a single
conspiracy count related to document fraud. The charge to which
he pleaded guilty carries a maximum of 15 years in prison, but he
is expected to be given a sentence much shorter than that.

The government said Budiman's name was used on the visa
applications of Jarrah and Ramzi Binalshibh, a Yemeni national
who the FBI believes would have taken part in the attacks had he
not been kept from entering the United States.

Budiman's lawyer, William Moffitt, said he did not know why
his client's name appeared on the applications. Moffitt said
Jarrah and Binalshibh, both of whom knew Budiman in Germany,
probably used the name without Budiman's knowledge.

The government said Budiman knew Atta when he lived in
Hamburg, Germany, in 1992 and had helped him move to an apartment
in the United States in 1998.

Moffitt said Budiman was not involved in the Sept. 11 attacks
nor had any advance knowledge of the attacks. Moffitt said the
fact that his client knew Atta, albeit under a different name, as
well as Jarrah and Binalshibh from a mosque in Germany had been
exaggerated by the U.S. government.

"This was all blown out of proportion in a manner that it has
been quite insulting," Moffitt told reporters outside the
courtroom. "It got off target from the very beginning and he has
been mistreated since that time."

Moffitt said that Budiman, who has been held at an Alexandria
jail for more than four months, often was confined to solitary
detention.

"The level of punishment is higher than anything of this
nature warrants," he said, adding that the fact that Budiman
voluntarily told the FBI that he knew Atta, Jarrah and Binalshibh
made the government's suspicions "a travesty."