MILITANTS GUILTY IN U.S. `HOLY WAR' PLAN

Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman and nine other militant Muslims were convicted Sunday of conspiring to wage a holy war against the United States with a string of terrorist bombings and assassinations.

The federal jury also convicted one defendant, El Sayyid Nosair, of killing extremist Rabbi Meir Kahane in 1990 as part of the larger conspiracy, an assassinationonce described as an isolated attack by a crazed gunman but later as the opening blow in a "war of urban terrorism."

The jurors, who had deliberated for a week, looked tired as their verdict was read.

Most of the defendants looked on sternly, but one smirked and another repeatedly yelled in Arabic, "Allahu Akbar!" or "God is great!," after jurors left the room.

Abdel-Rahman kept his head bowed, as he had throughout the trial while listening to an interpreter through headphones. He tried to comfort his lawyer, Lynne Stewart, as she cried.

Afterward, she told reporters that the blind cleric said he's not the first person to go to prison for his beliefs and he won't be the last.

Lawyers for the defendants said all will appeal.

The verdict concluded a nine-month trial that brought more than 200 witnesses and hundreds of exhibits to a heavily guarded Manhattan courthouse patrolled daily by a bomb-sniffing dog.

Facing a rarely used Civil War-era seditious conspiracy charge, the defendants were accused of plotting to force the United States to stop supporting Israel and Egypt, two enemies of militant Muslims.

"Terrorism is real. It is here. It is in this courtroom," Assistant U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald told the jury. He also said Abdel-Rahman called the United States "the No. 1 enemy of Islam."

The plot's centerpiece was a plan to set off five bombs in 10 minutes, blowing up the United Nations, the Lincoln and Holland tunnels, the George Washington Bridge and a federal building housing the FBI, the government charged. Videotapes showed defendants mixing bomb ingredients in a garage just before their arrest in 1993.

They also plotted to assassinate Egyptian President Hosni Mu-bar-ak and even discussed kidnapping ex-President Nixon, who died last year, and former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, the government said.

"If terrorism is theater, the acts of terrorism planned by these defendants was theater of the absurd," James Kallstrom, chief of the FBI's New York office, said after the verdict. "In their own demented way, they were going to send the United States a message. These verdicts return the favor in the strongest possible language."At the Abu Bakr mosque in Brooklyn, where the sheik once preached, the mood was subdued, sad and angry. "This is absolutely discrimination," said Nasser Ahmed, treasurer and acting spokesman.

Security was tightened at the nation's airports after the verdict, though officials said no specific threat had been received.

Stewart said the sheik would be moved to a prison hospital. He is diabetic and has heart trouble.

Besides seditious conspiracy, the defendants faced various lesser charges. Nosair and Ibrahim El-Gabrowny were each found innocent of a direct role in the plot to bomb New York City landmarks but convicted of the broader seditious conspiracy charge.

The sheik and Nosair face life in prison when they are sentenced in January; the rest face 20 to 30 years.