He was just playing John Wayne.
Abdul Kadir, a former member of the Guyana parliament and an alleged co-conspirator in the JFK fuel line terror plot, was just play-acting with his 11 children when he was photographed loaded for bear, he told a Brooklyn federal jury today.
Kadir, 58, who took the stand in his defense, is on trial for plotting to blow up fuel pipelines that feed the airport. He was arrested in June 2008 on his way to Iran to secure funding for the plot, prosecutors claim.
The feds have painted Kadir as a militant Muslim who made several trips to Iran to honor the Ayatollah Khomeini and the Iranian revolution that resulted in the taking of the American Embassy in 1979.
A photo of Kadir — shirtless with a gun in each hand and three handguns stuck in the waistband of his pants — which was confiscated when he was arrested trying to fly to Iran in June 2008, seems to reinforce that.
But the terror suspect, who once was a prime minister in the Guyanese government, told the jury that the photo was taken as a goof during the holidays with his family.
“It was Christmas time and we had all these toy guns around,” Kadir told the jury.
Kadir also said that he had welcomed co-defendant, Russell Defreitas, 66, and FBI mole Steven Francis, 39, into his home like a good Muslim, but he was never part of the plot.
In fact, he says he knew nothing about their scheme when the two showed him an amateur video of the fuel tanks at the airport.
When they told him about the plot, he said, he had been meeting with them in the hopes they would help him find investors to export Guyanese products to the U.S.
“I did not want to cut off my relationship with them,” he said.