Word: zagallai
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Colo., courthouse had every right to be confused. At issue were such wispy questions as whether Eugene Tafoya, 45, a much decorated former Green Beret, was working for the CIA or, in effect, for Libya's Muammar Gaddafi, when Tafoya knocked on the door of Libyan Student Faisal Zagallai, 36, in Fort Collins on Oct. 14,1980, and left the outspoken anti-Gaddafi dissident lying on the floor with two bullet wounds in his head...
...jurors did not accept the prosecution's claim that Tafoya had been hired by Edwin Wilson, a former CIA agent now working for Gaddafi in Tripoli, to kill Zagallai because the Colorado State student had criticized the Libyan dictator. Still, they did seem to conclude that some unknown other conspirators had sent Tafoya to rough the student up. The fact that Zagallai ended up blinded in one eye, rather than dead, apparently impressed the jurors that Tafoya had not been bent on murder. They were also told by the defense that Tafoya fired his gun only after a struggle...
...which understandably wanted to know what was going on in Gaddafi's inner circles. Tafoya's lawyer added another layer of complexity by suggesting that Wilson, too, might have been working under "deep cover" in Libya for the CIA. Tafoya's real mission in approaching Zagallai, the defense claimed, was to carry a message from the CIA asking the student to tone down his rhetoric on Middle East issues. But several jurors said after the verdict that they did not believe this story, either...
...Zagallai, 35, the son of a former mayor of Tripoli, originally came to the U.S. on a scholarship provided by the Gaddafi regime. But he soon soured on the dictator's repressive policies and became a leader of the anti-Gaddafi dissidents in the U.S., and had been warned by the FBI that he was a prime assassination target. Fortunately for him, the man who called at his apartment pretending to be a corporate recruiter bungled the job. Tafoya, 47, a 23-year veteran of the Army and the Marines, who fought in Viet Nam, fired at Zagallai...
When testimony gets under way in the heavily guarded courtroom in Fort Collins, a central question will be whether Libya's World Revolutionary Committee was telling the truth when it initially claimed to have ordered the murder of Faisal Zagallai. If it did, it probably acted through Wilson. This possibility has spurred the Justice Department, CIA and FBI to pursue more aggressively their investigation of the former operative's empire. An interagency task force has been set up to coordinate the case, and the House Intelligence Committee will begin public hearings by the end of the year...