LITTLE ROCK, Ark. — The man accused of killing an Army private outside an Arkansas recruiting center never suffered torture or beatings while jailed on an immigration violation in Yemen, an official with the country’s embassy said Friday.
Embassy spokesman Mohammed Albasha denied claims by Abdulhakim Muhammad’s attorney that abuse radicalized the man into becoming a terrorist.
Instead, Albasha said, the once-idealistic college student from Tennessee found his own way to religious anger after converting to Islam in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
Muhammad’s claims “are not credible because he is attempting to find any pretext to justify his violent actions, even those that are completely false,” Albasha said in a statement to The Associated Press. “He was not subjected to torture that has driven him to become a terrorist against his own fellow American citizens. These allegations are absurd.”
The 23-year-old Muhammad appeared briefly Friday in Little Rock District Court. Judge Alice Lightle formally appointed lawyer Jim Hensley, who raised the abuse claim Thursday, to represent him.
Muhammad has pleaded not guilty to a capital-murder charge in the death Monday of Pvt. William Long.
