GUANTANAMO BAY NAVY BASE, Cuba -- A military jury reached a swift verdict in the terror trial of an alleged al Qaeda propagandist Friday, just hours after a prosecutor emotionally accused the man of inciting suicide bombers to kill Americans.

Guards had already returned the accused terrorist to the barbed-wire ringed prison camp elsewhere on the base. So the judge, Air Force Col. Ronald Gregory, ordered the verdict sealed, and told the jury to return on Monday to announce it.

`WAR CRIMINAL'

''You are a terrorist and a war criminal,'' Army Maj. Dan Cowhig, the prosecutor, had told Ali Hamza al Bahlul in his closing argument before sending the jury to deliberate for what turned out to be less than four hours.

Bahlul, about 40, is charged with three war crimes covering 23 counts -- conspiracy, solicitation to murder and providing material support for terror for allegedly serving as Osama bin Laden's media secretary from 1999 until his capture in Afghanistan in 2001.

He sat silently through the trial each day, offering no defense in a self-styled boycott.

Nine jurors heard the case, all colonels and Navy captains. Under the military commission format, only six jurors must agree on the verdict.

Pentagon prosecutors say Bahlul committed war crimes by producing a crude anti-American al Qaeda recruiting video that spliced bin Laden's speeches with grisly news clips and a tribute to suicide bombers. They called 14 witnesses, including three ex-jihadists, interrogators and forensic experts.

Then the prosecutor evoked powerful, provocative imagery in urging his fellow U.S. officers to convict Bahlul.

Cowhig said Bahlul's work stirred the Sept. 11, 2001, hijackers ``to shred themselves and hundreds of the others through the towers of the World Trade Center and the walls of the Pentagon and a field in Pennsylvania.''

As bin Laden's video maker, he said, Bahlul ''shouts through the medium of video . . . to recruit, to motivate and to incite others to join al Qaeda,'' which he labeled ``a band of lawless wretches in armed conflict with the United States.''

Bahlul sat silently at the defense table in a tan prison camp uniform, never once speaking to the Air Force Reserve major assigned to represent him.

RIGHT TO SILENCE

Before the closing, the judge had twice cautioned jurors that they should draw no conclusions from the defense strategy.

''He is under no obligation to say or do anything to establish his innocence,'' he said.

``The accused has an absolute right to stand silent and do nothing but require the government to prove its case against him beyond a reasonable doubt.''

U.S. agents testified at the trial that Bahlul told interrogators here that he worked for bin Laden in Afghanistan as his media secretary from 1999 to 2001.

ASSIGNMENT

In prison camp confessions, Bahlul reportedly boasted that bin Laden personally assigned him the recruiting video, which glorified the October 2000 suicide bombing of the USS Cole in the port of Aden, Yemen. Seventeen U.S. sailors were killed.

Bahlul also allegedly prepared talking points for bin Laden's interviews, followed the al Qaeda leader's motorcade in a van equipped with video equipment and an AK-47 assault rifle and swore a pledge of allegiance to the former Saudi millionaire, who now tops America's Most Wanted List.

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