In an emotionally charged sentencing hearing, the defendant Mamdouh Mahmud Salim was confronted by his mutilated victim, who was left permanently brain damaged and partially paralyzed and blinded in the attack.

“How about me? Look at me. Every day it hurts,” yelled the guard, Louis Pepe, who pointed at Salim from his wheelchair. “You, you were no good. It’s dead, it’s all gone. There’s nothing there,” he said holding the empty socket where his left eye had been.

Salim, 47, who prosecutors say is the highest-ranking member of bin Laden’s al Qaeda network to face trial in the United States, had pleaded guilty in 2002 to attempted murder and conspiracy to murder a federal official. The embassy bombing charges are still pending against him.

The defendant kept his head bowed and cupped in his hands as the victim, who has difficulty remembering words, used sounds and graphic gestures to describe the assault. During the attack, Salim and another inmate sprayed Pepe’s face with hot sauce, battled him to the ground and then plunged a sharpened comb into his left eye and into his brain.

“They hit me so many times. They hit me again. They hit me again, they hit me again,” Pepe said. He gestured that they tried to rape him and then demonstrated the stabbing with a comb he had brought.

When Salim’s lawyer pleaded for leniency, Pepe repeatedly interrupted and U.S. District Judge Deborah Batts eventually had him wheeled outside. A number of corrections officers observing the proceeding protested loudly from the back of the courtroom and walked out shouting “unity, unity.”

In sentencing Salim, Batts also ordered Salim to pay over $4.7 million in restitution if any hidden assets were found.

“The cold immediacy of the precision in which he plunged the sharpened weapon deeply into the eye of a downed and struggling man is appalling,” Batts said. She said that Salim could have chosen to stab a different part of Pepe’s body but “Salim’s first and only choice was the eye.”

When Batts asked Salim if he wanted to say anything before being sentenced, at first the defendant told a translator he did not know what to say and that there was no way to apologize for taking a man’s eye.

“What happened was wrong and I accept responsibility.” However, later in the proceeding, Salim said he objected to Pepe’s account of the attempted rape and said he had never “touched” a man or woman, never drank alcohol or smoked.

the la times had an interview with the above victim a few years ago at his domecile under the brooklym bridge where pepe offered the la times guy one of his two daily beers, pepe never got any of the charity money directed at 911