[JURIST] A judge for the US District Court for the Southern District of New York [official website] on Tuesday resentenced Wadih El-Hage [GlobalSecurity profile] to life in prison for his role in the 1998 bombing of two US embassies [PBS backgrounder] in Tanzania and Kenya. El-Hage was permitted to speak [NYT report] before the sentencing, where he complained that the jury was biased and given improper instructions and that his lawyers should have allowed him to testify. Judge Lewis Kaplan issued a sentence of life in prison, saying that he believed El-Hage was a committed terrorist who would commit further acts of terrorism if permitted to do so. El-Hage is currently serving his sentence at the supermax prison in Florence, Colorado.

El-Hage, a former personal secretary to Osama Bin Laden [WP obituary; JURIST news archive], was tried and convicted on conspiracy and other charges in 2001 and sentenced to life in prison. A federal appeals court upheld the conviction [JURIST report] in 2008 but ordered a resentencing because the original life sentence was based on federal mandatory sentencing guidelines invalidated [JURIST reports] by the US Supreme Court in 2005.