Brooklyn Bookseller Gets 13 Years

The owner of an Islamic bookstore in Brooklyn was sentenced yesterday to 13 years in prison for conspiring with a government informant to send money to jihadists in Afghanistan and Chechnya.

Abdulrahman Farhane is one of four men charged in federal court in Manhattan after a wide-ranging terrorism investigation that began in the weeks after the attacks of September 11, 2001. Two of the other defendants have pleaded guilty, and the fourth is scheduled for trial.

Farhane, 52, was the proprietor of the House of Knowledge bookstore on Atlantic Avenue until his arrest last year. The case began when a government informant approached him at the bookstore in December 2001 and asked for help sending money overseas to buy weapons and communication equipment for jihadists.

Farhane agreed to help the informant by putting him in touch with another customer at the store.

Before he was sentenced yesterday, Farhane said, "I love America," the Associated Press reported. Farhane, a father of six, is an American citizen.

I am "asking you to look at me and at my family with kindness and mercy and relief," Farhane had written to Judge Loretta Preska, "so I can go back … to live my normal life."