Wadih el-Hage

The Nairobi house was raided on August 21, 1998. el-Hage himself was questioned two days later upon his return to Nairobi from Afghanistan. el-Hage's family says that he was told to leave Kenya. In September 1997, he returned to Arlington with his family; several accounts say that he sold all of his possessions to fund the trip. However, upon arriving in the United States, he was arrested on September 15, 1998.

In 1994, his wife April convinced el-Hage to leave Sudan and stop working for Bin Laden's organization there. As his mother in law said, "April would have none of that. She is Muslim, but she is also American, and she wouldn't stand for it." However, prosecutors believe that el-Hage continued to work for bin Laden's organisation in Nairobi, Kenya. In Kenya, he became the director of Help Africa People, a Muslim charity organization, which Kenyan documents say helped control malaria. El-Hage also made money in the jewelry business. Prosecutors say that el-Hage was in contact in Kenya with Abu Ubaidah al-Banshiri, who was al-Qaeda's #2 member until his death in 1996. The badly wanted al-Qaeda suspect Fazul Abdullah Mohammed moved in and worked at the house as a secretary. A letter, Mohammed Saddiq Odeh, admitted knowing el-Hage in Nairobi and said that el-Hage attended his wedding.

In January 1992, el-Hage was arrested for writing false checks. In the car with him was Marwan Salama, whose phone records show his contact with the conspirators of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

At an Islamic conference in Oklahoma in December 1989, el-Hage met Mahmud Abouhalima, who was later convicted for his part in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. El-Hage's prosecutors say that Abouhalima told el-Hage to buy a .38 caliber revolver. El Sayyid Nosair used that revolver to kill Rabbi Meir Kahane.

El-Hage interrupted his schooling to travel to Afghanistan via Pakistan to participate in the fighting against the USSR. He was reportedly under Abdullah Yusuf Azzam, an important figure in the early history of al-Qaeda. El-Hage returned to his university in January 1985, graduating in 1986. Married by now, to an 18-year-old American Muslim named April, he relocated to Arizona. There he held several low-wage jobs including city custodian. He became a naturalized citizen of the United States in 1989.

Wadih Elias el-Hage (Arabic: وديع الحاج ‎, Wadī‘ al-Ḥāj) (born July 25, 1960) is a Lebanese-born American former al-Qaeda member who is serving life imprisonment in the United States based on conspiracy charges for the 1998 United States embassy bombings. He was indicted and arrested in 1998, and convicted on all counts and sentenced to life without parole in 2001. His sentence was overturned in 2008 because it was based on federal mandatory sentencing guidelines invalidated by the US Supreme Court in 2005. He was re-sentenced to life without parole in 2013. El-Hage and his co-defendants are currently in the supermax prison known as ADX Florence.

El-Hage was born in a Maronite Christian family on 25 July 1960 in Sidon, Lebanon, but grew up in Kuwait, where he converted to Islam. He traveled to the United States for college. From 1978, he studied urban planning at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, then-named the University of Southwestern Louisiana.