Millennium Bomber Wrist-Slap Upheld

US News | Thu, Dec 4, 2008 at 2:56:55 pm PST

After government prosecutors appealed his light sentence, Ahmed Ressam, convicted of planning to explode a huge car bomb at Los Angeles International Airport, has been re-sentenced to the same amount of prison time.

Dec. 4 (Bloomberg) — Ahmed Ressam, convicted of plotting to blow up Los Angeles International Airport, was sentenced to 22 years in prison yesterday, almost two years after an appeals court threw out an earlier term of the same length.

U.S. District Judge John Coughenour in Seattle handed down the sentence yesterday. Ressam, who was convicted in 2001 of conspiracy and carrying explosives, was sentenced in 2005 to 22 years in prison. A native of Algeria, Ressam was arrested in Port Angeles, Washington, in December 1999 as he drove off a ferry from British Columbia with a trunk filled with bomb-making materials. After his conviction, Ressam cooperated with prosecutors until early 2003.

In January 2007, the U.S. Court of Appeals in San Francisco ordered that Ressam’s sentence be recalculated because the court threw out one of his convictions, a count for carrying an explosive during the commission of a felony. That charge carried a mandatory minimum sentence of 10 years under federal guidelines. Prosecutors asked Coughenour to consider a 45-year sentence because Ressam reneged on his cooperation.