NEW YORK, April 9 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - Four people, including an American attorney, were indicted Tuesday by a federal court for providing material support and resources to a group led by Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, currently behind bars for his role in a 1993 attack on New York. 

Announcing the indictment at the U.S. attorney's office in New York in, Attorney General John Ashcroft said due to Rahman's determination to "exploit" the rights guaranteed him under the U.S. justice system, the Justice Department will invoke the authority to "monitor the communications" between the inmate and his attorneys. 

CNN reports Ashcroft as saying that the four helped Rahman "direct" terrorist activity from his prison cell in the United States. 

Rahman's organization, the Islamic Group, operates globally with an "active" membership in the United States, Ashcroft said. 

According to Ashcroft, it is believed to be linked to the al-Qaeda network of Osama bin Laden, which Washington blames for the September 11 attacks toppling the World Trade Center. 

Rahman, 63, was the lead defendant among 10 men convicted in 1995 for plotting, in 1993, to blow up the same buildings. However, news agencies report Ashcroft said the Islamic Group had no connection to the September 11 attacks, but that the organization has active membership in the United States, concentrated in the New York metropolitan area. 

Rahman was also charged with conspiring to assassinate Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. 

The individuals named in the indictment, Aschroft said, are Lynne Stewart, Rahman's attorney and a well-known civil rights lawyer; Mohammed Yousry, the Arabic language interpreter for communications between Stewart and Rahman; Ahmed Abdel Sattar, a resident of Staten Island, New York, and an active Islamic Group leader described as a "surrogate" for Rahman; and Yassir Al-Sirri, the former head of the London-based Islamic Observation Center, currently in custody in Britain. 

The indictment charged the defendants with unlawful communications with Rahman during prison visits and telephone calls, and that they had violated "Special Administrative Measures" restricting the blind sheikh's communications with the outside world "to provide material support and resources to the Islamic Group." 

"Rahman used communications with Stewart, translated by Yousry, to pass messages to and receive messages from Sattar, Al-Sirri and other Islamic Group members," Ashcroft said, reading from the indictment. 

Special rules were imposed on Rahman in 1997, Ashcroft said, forbidding him from passing or receiving written or recorded communications from other inmates, prison guards or others in the outside world. 

The strictures were later tightened to prohibit Rahman from communicating with members of the media either in person or through his attorneys. 

"Today's indictment charges that Lynne Stewart and Mohammed Yousry repeatedly and willfully violated these orders to maintain Sheikh Abdel Rahman's influence over the terrorist activities of the Islamic Group," Ashcroft said. 

The indictment includes among such violations a May 2000 incident wherein Stewart allowed Yousry to read letters to Rahman regarding Islamic Group compliance with a ceasefire observed after a deadly attack against 58 tourists and four Egyptians in Luxor in 1997, for which the group claimed responsibility. 

The indictment further alleged that Stewart and Abdel Sattar issued a public statement falsely claiming Rahman was denied appropriate treatment for diabetes when in fact, Ashcroft said, he willfully refused to take insulin. 

In October, the Department of Justice created a rule to allow monitoring of communications between attorneys and incarcerated clients who were suspected of terrorist activity and already under Special Administrative Measures. 

Rahman's case will be the first time the special rule is imposed, as he is "determined to exploit the rights guaranteed him under the United States system of justice to pursue the destruction of that very system," Ashcroft said. 

"The United States cannot and will not stand by and allow this to happen." 
Rahman is currently incarcerated at the Federal Medical Center in Rochester, Minnesota, reports CNN.