Wadih el-Hage

Wadih Elias el-Hage (Arabic: وديع الحاج, Wadī‘ al-Ḥāj) (born July 25, 1960) is a Lebanese and naturalized American citizen, who is serving life imprisonment in the United States based on conspiracy charges relating to the 1998 United States embassy bombings.

[1] Struggling financially, he decided to move his family to Quetta, Pakistan, but returned to run the Al Kifah Refugee Center in Brooklyn after the death of Mustafa Shalabi.

[6] El-Hage was born in a Maronite Christian family on 25 July 1960 in Sidon, Lebanon,[7] but grew up in Kuwait, where he converted to Islam.

His family was so angered by his conversion that he was forced to leave home and was taken in by a Kuwaiti sheikh who paid for his education, including college.

[9] El-Hage interrupted his schooling to travel to Afghanistan via Pakistan, although his lifelong physical disability prevented any direct participation in the fighting against the USSR, he instead worked for a Saudi charity called the Muslim World League.

At an Islamic conference in Oklahoma in December 1989, el-Hage met Mahmud Abouhalima, who was later convicted for his part in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

He was called to the Brooklyn charity Alkifah Refugee Center, by the group's office in Tucson, via el-Hage's mosque in Arlington.

A week later, the group's leader, Mustafa Shalabi, was found stabbed to death in an apartment that he shared with Abouhalima.

In the car with him was Marwan Salama, whose phone records show his contact with the conspirators of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

[citation needed] Shortly thereafter, el-Hage moved his family to Sudan and worked as a secretary for Osama bin Laden, who operated a network of businesses and charities, some of them fronts, in East Africa at the time.

[13][14] A year after el-Hage returned to America with his family, the U.S. embassies in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania and Nairobi, Kenya were attacked with truck bombs on August 7, 1998.

He also testified before a grand jury investigating the embassy attacks where he claimed to have never known al-Banshiri, Odeh or other associates of bin-Laden.

After a six-month trial, el-Hage was convicted of conspiracies to kill U.S. nationals; to murder U.S. government employees and internationally protected persons; and to destroy buildings and property of the United States as well as multiple counts of perjury.