WASHINGTON — The Libyan militia leader suspected of playing a central role in the 2012 attacks in Benghazi that killed four Americans, including the US ambassador, entered a plea of not guilty through his lawyer Saturday.
The suspect, Ahmed Abu Khattala, was flown to Washington by helicopter shortly after sunrise from a Navy warship where he had been held since his capture two weeks ago in Libya by US Special Operations forces. Abu Khattala appeared for arraignment before a magistrate in the federal courthouse in Washington.
The plea of not guilty was in response to a single charge of conspiracy. Abu Khattala wore a black hooded shirt and dark pants during the arraignment, which lasted about 10 minutes. He is next scheduled to appear in court Tuesday for a detention hearing, followed by a July 8 status hearing.
The Justice Department has charged Abu Khattala with three counts in connection with the attacks on the US mission in Benghazi and a nearby CIA facility on Sept. 11, 2012. The attacks resulted in the death of the US ambassador to Libya, J. Christopher Stevens.
Moving Abu Khattala to Washington to face charges was a significant step forward for the Obama administration. It had been criticized for moving too slowly to apprehend suspects, with Democrats and Republicans injecting partisan statements into the debate about embassy security and accurate assessments of militant threats.
Some also criticized the administration’s decision to prosecute Abu Khattala in civilian court rather than through the military tribunal system at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
Current and former senior US law enforcement officials briefed on the government’s investigation of Abu Khattala said the next phase of the case — proving the charges against him in federal court — would be particularly challenging because the attacks occurred in a country that is not friendly to the United States.
FBI investigators were not able to visit the crime scenes in Benghazi to collect evidence until several weeks after the attacks because of concerns about security there. The case also relies on testimony from Libyan witnesses who will most likely have to be flown to the United States to testify and who might not hold up well to being cross-examined.
Yet law enforcement officials have confidence in the work.
“We have plenty of evidence to convict this guy,” one senior official said. “Now it’s just a matter of getting him to the courthouse.”
The hostile environment in Libya and the difficulty of tracking down and interviewing all the witnesses were among the reasons the investigation took so long, even amid reports that Abu Khattala was meeting with reporters for drinks to discuss the attacks after they occurred.
“We were dealing with one of the most nonpermissive environments at the time, and our guys were able to put together a case,” the senior official said.
While US intelligence agencies were able to intercept electronic conversations that could help the investigation, their classified nature makes them problematic to use in a public criminal trial, officials said.
The case is expected to be presented mainly on eyewitness accounts and video from the scene. Hundreds of hours of video from security cameras and other sources were analyzed to produce a narrative of the time leading up to the attacks, the siege of the mission and the CIA annex, and the aftermath, one of the officials said.
“The Department of Justice bats nearly 1,000 percent with these types of extraterritorial cases, but that’s because they put in so much diligence on the front end of the investigations,” said Neil H. MacBride, who was the US attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia from 2009 to 2013.
“You don’t go to the other side of the world to grab someone without knowing that there is a high probability of a conviction,” MacBride said.
The Justice Department “rarely asks the Department of Defense to grab someone,” he said. “And the Department of Defense isn’t going to put its Special Operations forces on the ground without a high degree of certainty about a case.”