Defense lawyers want the word "terrorist" banned as too inflammatory in the U.S. trial of Jose Padilla and two other men charged with conspiring to aid Islamist extremists overseas.

The word conjures up visions of someone with a bomb belt blowing up himself and others in a crowded cafe, Jeanne Baker, an attorney representing co-defendant Adham Amin Hassoun, said during a hearing in the high-profile case on Friday.

"The word terrorist has nothing to do with this case," Baker said. "The word terrorist is used to label an enemy."

U.S. District Judge Marcia Cooke, who has set trial for April 16, did not immediately rule on the request.

But one of the prosecutors, Assistant U.S. Attorney John Shipley, noted during the hearing that "'Terrorist' has no standard definition."

Hassoun, Padilla and co-defendant Kifah Wael Jayyousi are accused of providing recruits and money to mujahideen warriors who conspired to murder, maim and kidnap people in Afghanistan, Chechnya, Bosnia and elsewhere during the 1990s.

Mujahideen, or holy warriors, is a term for Islamic guerrilla groups. The word is used in the indictment but prosecutors want to call expert witnesses to explain the term and its relation to various groups, including al Qaeda.

Defense lawyers plan to call historians and a U.S. Army officer as experts to tell the jury that mujahideen groups are not synonymous with terrorists, and that their actions do not necessarily amount to murder.

BOSNIA AND CHECHNYA VIOLENCE

They said the U.S. government has portrayed the Russian army as victims of mujahideen violence in Chechnya, and the Serbian and Croatian forces as victims of mujahideen "murderers" in Bosnia.

Human rights groups and the State Department have criticized Russia's human rights record in Chechnya and the United Nations found that Bosnian Serb forces committed genocide against Bosnian Muslims.

The defense lawyers want to tell the jurors about the 1995 massacre at Srebrenica, where Bosnian Serb forces killed thousands of Bosnian Muslim men and boys, and about crimes committed by Russian forces against Muslims in Chechnya.

They suggested they would argue that the defendants had no intent to abet murders and that the groups they are accused of aiding may in fact have been fighting to defend fellow Muslims who were under attack.

"You cannot just assume that when they killed, if they killed, it was murder," Baker said. "Defending Muslims is not committing murder."

Media attention on the case has focused largely on Padilla, a 36-year-old American citizen arrested in Chicago upon his return from Egypt and Pakistan in May 2002.

He was accused of plotting to set off a radioactive bomb in the United States and President George W. Bush ordered him held as an "enemy combatant" in a military brig for 3-1/2 years.

While a challenge to Bush's authority to hold Padilla without charge was pending in the Supreme Court, Padilla was indicted in Florida on charges unrelated to any bombs.

The judge has already ruled that Padilla is mentally fit to stand trial, but still must rule on a defense claim that the government's treatment of him was so outrageous the charges should be dropped.

Prosecutors contend that Hassoun recruited Padilla to attend an al Qaeda training camp, which Hassoun denies. All three defendants have pleaded innocent and would face life imprisonment if convicted on all the charges.