By Jane Sutton MIAMI, April 4 (Reuters) - Evidence from alleged al Qaeda operative Jose Padilla can be used against him at trial despite defense claims the American's arrest was based on information obtained through torture, a U.S. judge ruled on Wednesday. U.S. District Judge Marcia Cooke refused to reconsider a magistrate's ruling in September to admit Padilla's statements to the FBI as evidence in his trial starting on April 16 on charges of conspiring to aid Islamist extremists overseas. Cooke said the defense failed to raise any new arguments. The warrant the FBI used to arrest Padilla at Chicago's O'Hare airport in May 2002 was based in part on information provided by two prisoners held at the U.S. military jail at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, Abu Zubaydah and Binyam Muhammad, prosecutors acknowledged in November. The information was the basis for the government's initial accusation that Padilla planned a "dirty bomb" attack on the United States -- an allegation that was quietly dropped when he was finally brought into the normal U.S. court system after 3-1/2 years in a military brig. Padilla, who has not been charged in connection with any bomb plot, faces life in prison if convicted of helping terrorist groups. Muhammad is an Ethiopian electrical engineer accused by the United States of receiving explosives training from al Qaeda, which he denies. Zubaydah is an alleged al Qaeda lieutenant whom the United States describes as Osama bin Laden's liaison with numerous terrorist cells. They were captured separately in Pakistan in 2002. Documents filed with the U.S. war crimes tribunals at Guantanamo said Muhammad and Padilla viewed bomb-making instructions on a computer in Pakistan and met there with Zubaydah to discuss the feasibility of carrying out dirty bomb attacks in the United States. Zubaydah told interrogators that Muhammad and Padilla were plotting a bomb attack and identified Padilla from a copy of his passport photo, according to court documents in the Padilla case. Padilla's lawyers said both men's statements were obtained through torture and "are equally worthless." Therefore, they argued, Padilla's statements to the FBI were the fruit of torture and cannot be used as evidence in court. Muhammad has claimed in court documents that he gave false confessions implicating Padilla while held in a Moroccan prison, where he was beaten and slashed on the chest and penis with scalpels before being sent to Guantanamo. Zubaydah was transferred to Guantanamo in September, along with 13 other "high-value" captives who had been held in secret CIA prisons. The New York Times has said his interrogators stripped him naked, held him in an ice-cold room and subjected him to deafeningly loud music. President George W. Bush has denied Zubaydah and the other prisoners were tortured in CIA custody but said in a Sept. 6 speech that interrogators used "an alternative set of procedures" to get information from them that thwarted attacks against the United States. Bush initially ordered Padilla, 36, transferred to a military brig and held without charges as an "enemy combatant." While a challenge to that order was pending in the Supreme Court last year, Padilla was transferred to civilian custody and charged with providing money and recruits to terrorist organizations that conspired to kidnap, maim and murder people in Afghanistan, Chechnya, Bosnia and elsewhere.
