By Jane Sutton

MIAMI, June 21 (Reuters) - Prosecutors can show most of a videotaped 1997 interview with Osama bin Laden to jurors in the terrorism trial of former "dirty bomber" suspect Jose Padilla even though there is no evidence Padilla ever saw it, a judge ruled on Thursday.

Prosecutors sought to play the CNN interview for the jury because Padilla's co-defendants, Adham Amin Hassoun and Kifah Wael Jayyousi, discussed and praised it on wiretapped phone calls after it aired in 1997.

On the tape, made long before he became a household name for masterminding the Sept. 11 attacks, bin Laden calls for the killing of U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia and criticizes U.S. support for Israel and U.S. bombings in Iraq.

Defense lawyers said the interview had nothing to do with the charges that the defendants provided material support to Islamist militants in Chechnya, Bosnia and Kosovo. They said the tape would inflame and prejudice the jurors.

The FBI arrested Padilla at Chicago's O'Hare airport in May 2002 as a material witness in an investigation into Sept. 11, and the government said then he was plotting to set off a radiological "dirty bomb" in the United States.

A U.S. citizen, he was held in a military prison for 3-1/2 years as an "enemy combatant" before being added to the case against the other two defendants in Miami.

He was not involved in the wiretapped conversation, and his lawyers said he had never seen or discussed the bin Laden tape. They said they will ask for a mistrial if it is played.

All three defendants face life in prison if convicted on charges of conspiring to "murder, kidnap and maim" people overseas and providing material support for terrorists.

They are accused of providing money and recruits for Islamist groups waging violent jihad in Afghanistan, Algeria, Bosnia, Chechnya, Lebanon, Libya and Somalia. None of the three are accused of committing violent acts.

Hassoun is a Lebanese-born Palestinian computer programmer, and Jayyousi is a Jordanian-born U.S. citizen who served in the U.S. Navy aboard a nuclear submarine.

AlertNet news is provided by