Dix informant explains revenge shooting in Albania

Besnik Bakalli first tried to sneak into the United States with a fake passport in 1999, but customs officers caught him at the airport and put him in jail.

Bakalli applied for asylum, but he gave up the request voluntarily and returned to his native Albania after he got word that a man - "a criminal" - had threatened his younger sister.

In Albania, Bakalli explained yesterday, such disputes are settled privately - and violently.

"My dad said, somebody got to do it. Me or him or somebody," he testified.

So Bakalli tracked down the man who had menaced his sister and shot him.

After he slipped back into the United States, Bakalli eventually became an FBI informant against the five men now charged with plotting an armed attack on Fort Dix inspired by radical Islam.

The defense is expected to challenge Bakalli's credibility as a witness with a sordid past, focusing on the shooting in Albania.

Bakalli, 31, became an informant after he was caught in the country illegally the second time and faced deportation. In exchange for helping the FBI, Bakalli said, he has been promised help with his immigration status.

The FBI also arranged to bring Bakalli's mother and father to the United States.

At the behest of the government, Bakalli befriended three of the Fort Dix defendants - brothers Dritan, Eljvir and Shain Duka, ethnic Albanians from the former Yugoslavia.

The Dukas and the other two defendants - Mohamad Shnewer and Serdar Tatar - are foreign-born Muslims raised in South Jersey.

A second FBI informant, Mahmoud Omar, befriended Shnewer, a fellow Arabic speaker. The Egyptian native, who was convicted of a federal bank fraud in 2002, was paid about $240,000 for his cooperation.

Bakalli was paid, as well, but only to cover lost wages for the time he spent with the Dukas. He estimated the amount to be from $12,000 to $13,000.

Both Omar and Bakalli secretly recorded hundreds of hours of conversation with the defendants - tapes that are at the heart of the case.

Defense attorneys vigorously attacked Omar, who spent 13 days on the witness stand, suggesting that he goaded the defendants with tough talk about jihad. They said the men never would have carried out an attack on Fort Dix.

Bakalli has testified for two days, during which the jury mostly listened to the recordings he made.

At no time on the recordings did the men discuss Fort Dix, but their conversations were dominated by talk of weapons, jihad and Muslims fighting around the world, mostly against U.S. forces.

Yesterday, the jurors heard only tapes made during a weeklong trip Bakalli took to the Poconos with the Dukas and others in February 2007.

While in the mountains, the men visited several gun stores to look at weapons and went to a shooting range several times. Prosecutors have called the trip training for a jihadist attack.

At one point, while discussing the capabilities of a rifle, Eljvir Duka asked if it could "hit the American soldiers in Iraq."

"Do you think I can be like Juba the sniper?" he asked, referring to a sniper said to have targeted U.S. forces in Iraq. "Do you think I can stand far enough from the White House? Do you think I can hit George Bush?"

Deputy U.S. Attorney Bill Fitzpatrick asked Bakalli to describe Eljvir Duka's attitude when he talked about shooting the president.

"He was for real, serious," Bakalli answered.

During one trip to the range, Bakalli said, the men put balloons on the targets to simulate human heads.

On the recordings, they talked about when suicide bombings were permissible under Islamic law, and they discussed guerilla tactics employed against the United States in Iraq.

The Dukas asserted that the insurgents were winning despite facing a far-better-equipped enemy.

"They have laser-guided [bombs]," Eljvir Duka said. "We have Allah-guided."

Bakalli said on Monday that he knew nothing about the Islamic faith, and he often seemed to push back against the Dukas' rhetoric.

While in the Poconos, the men watched videos downloaded from the Internet that included gruesome scenes of dead Americans in Iraq, including a severed hand displayed for the camera.

On the recording, Bakalli seemed troubled by the images.

"That's it. That's it. That's enough," he said. "I will see you later. . . . I go for walk."

After the videos were shown in court yesterday, Bakalli asked for a break from testifying.

His unease with the violence could clash with the story of his shooting a man in Albania. His victim, who survived, was armed, Bakalli said.

Bakalli was convicted in absentia of a gun crime. The Albanian judge sentenced him to a year in jail if he could be caught within five years.

While describing the shooting, Bakalli became irritated by the notion that he could have settled the dispute another way - or called police.

"We don't have no 911 in there," he said. "If you go to the police, they going to laugh at you. 'You not man enough to handle it?' We're talking about Albania, not the U.S."

After the incident, Bakalli said he left Albania out of "respect" for the other man's family.

"If I could have stayed in there, we would have a war between the two families," he said. "And the cops would just watch."