Shehata was alternately reported to have been sentenced to death, or a light prison sentence,
in absentia in 1991 following the al-Jihad assassination of
Anwar Sadat. He maintained telephone contact with Jaballah through 1996 when the latter moved to Canada. In October, al-Jihad's London leader
Adel Abdel Bary contacted Jaballah to mention he was shipping him several books and periodicals, including al-Mujahideen and al-Faqr for distribution in Canada, and copies of the Shifaa and some audiocassettes he asked him to forward on to Shehata. Also in December, Shehata, now Jaballah's brother-in-law to whom he had offered financial support, told Jaballah that he was in Syria and preparing to go stay with "Daoud", believed to be a reference to
Ibrahim Eidarous who was staying in
Azerbaijan. Shehata received permission to visit the prisoners, and is believed to have smuggled them $3000 which was later confiscated from their cell, and to have given them a letter which the Russians did not bother to translate. Shehata was sent on to Chechnya, where he met with
Ibn Khattab. In July 1998, Jaballah phoned Ibrahim Ismail Allam and passed on a message Shehata had asked him to deliver. Two days prior to the
1998 United States embassy bombings, Shehata was again contacted by Jaballah, and hours before the bombing happened Mabruk phoned Jaballah and asked him to get Eidarous to call him on Shehata's
cell phone, and Jaballah passed on the message. The day after the bombings, Mabruk told Jaballah that he and Shehata were leaving Azerbaijan and that they should break off all contact now; but Shehata phoned Jaballah a short time later and informed him that he'd moved to Lebanon, but didn't have a phone in his new location. He never again contacted Jaballah, The
Associated Press later stated that he had been again sentenced to death
in absentia in 1998. ==Alleged involvement in al-Qaeda, arrest==