April 16, 2008	Wednesday	Rabi-us-Sani 9, 1429

SEATTLE, April 15: The man accused of shooting at the Seattle Jewish Federation two years ago, killing one woman and wounding five, was not insane but had a deliberate plan to make a blood-soaked political point, prosecutors said on Monday as his trial opened.

Naveed Haq, 32, a Pakistani-American born in the United States, has pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity to charges of murder and attempted murder in the July, 2006 attack. If convicted, he faces life in prison without parole.

Prosecutor Erin Ehlert said Haq, who is Muslim, stalked through the office, shooting one victim after another, in one case reaching over a cubicle wall before pulling the trigger. She said he chased Pamela Waechter toward an exit, fatally shooting her as she ran down the stairs.

Ehlert told jurors on Monday that Haq carefully planned his attack, making four separate trips to gun shops and using the Internet to map the 227-mile (365-kilometer) trip from his parents’ home in Pasco in eastern Washington state to the Jewish Federation in Seattle.“He thought about what he did. He planned what he did,” she said.

John Carpenter, Haq’s defence lawyer, called the shooting “the acts of a madman” and said they came “not from a darkened heart, but from a diseased man”.

Carpenter said the defence would present volumes of mental health files, showing Haq’s bipolar schizophrenic and psychotic tendencies, including grandiose thoughts, hearing voices from walls and paranoid delusions.

Prosecutors plan to show surveillance video of Haq forcing a 14-year-old girl at gunpoint to help him get into the building; the teen’s aunt, a worker at the building, was among those injured.

Ehlert said Haq was on a mission to make a political statement: “That the Jewish people in America have too much power.”

Ehlert played a recording of an emergency call in which Haq asked to be connected to CNN and said he was making a point about US support for Israel and the war in Iraq.—AP