New York man gets six years in jail for airing Al-Manar
A Pakistani immigrant whom a prosecutor called "Hizbullah”s man in New York City" has been sentenced to nearly six years in prison for airing the Lebanese group”s television station. US District Judge Richard M. Berman handed down a sentence of five years and nine months to Javed Iqbal, who had pleaded guilty in December to providing aid to a terrorist group.
Iqbal, 45, admitted as part of a plea agreement that he used satellite dishes on his Staten Island home to distribute broadcasts of Al-Manar, the TV station of Hizbullah.
Assistant US Attorney Eric Snyder said Iqbal recruited Al-Manar, even traveling to "the belly of the beast, South Beirut," to meet with its general manager.
"He was, in a very real sense, Hizbullah”s man in New York City," Snyder said.
Snyder said Iqbal bought special satellite equipment to allow Al-Manar to provide 24-hour programming from November 2005 through May 2006 so Hizbullah could use it to recruit followers and suicide bombers. Prosecutors said that Iqbal”s business was paid $28,000 monthly for at least five months for airing the station to its North American customers.
Iqbal”s lawyer, Josh Dratel, said his client didn”t intend to aid Hizbullah as he tried to build his Brooklyn-based satellite television company, HDTV Limited.
Dratel called the airing of Al-Manar "one discreet and narrow aspect" of an otherwise legitimate broadcasting company that also aired Christian programming, adult entertainment, a Jamaican channel and a gay and lesbian channel.
Before Iqbal was sentenced, he had Dratel read aloud a statement he had written. The statement said that he did not make any profit by airing Al-Manar and that the resulting criminal charges had "hurt me financially, emotionally and physically." It asked for leniency from the judge.
In court papers, Dratel argued that Iqbal does not possess any ideology sympathetic to terrorism or other political doctrine, and he noted that one of HDTV”s partners was a city police officer.