A former Pelham High School student convicted of training with firearms and explosives at a terrorist camp in Somalia with al-Qaida members was sentenced yesterday to 10 years in prison.

Daniel Maldonado, 28, showed little emotion in the Houston, Texas, courtroom where U.S. District Court Judge Gray Miller handed down the maximum sentence. As part of an earlier plea arrangement, a more serious charge of conspiracy to use a weapon of mass destruction was dropped. It carried a possible sentence of life in prison.

The Federal Bureau of Prisons will now decide where Maldonado will serve his time, though his lawyer asked at his sentencing hearing that he be incarcerated in or near New Hampshire. Maldonado's three young children live with his parents in Londonderry.

No family members were present for yesterday's sentencing, but Maldonado's mother, Rena Maldonado, wrote the judge a five-page statement pleading for leniency. She said her son loves his family and country and never joined al-Qaida. All he was trying to do, she said, was help the Somali people.

Maldonado grew up in Newton and Pelham and attended Pelham High School. He later lived in Derry, Manchester, and Methuen, Mass. He lived in Houston for four months in 2005 before moving with his wife and three children to Cairo, Egypt.

They later moved to Somalia, where Maldonado's wife, Tamekia Cunningham, died of malaria. In January, shortly after his wife's death, Maldonado was captured by the Kenyan military while trying to flee Somalia. He was brought back to the United States in February.

In statements made to FBI agents after his arrest, Maldonado said he had "no problem" with killing Americans or with the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States, according to the FBI.

But Rena Maldonado painted a very different picture of her son in her letter, describing him as a devastated man whose children yearn for him.

"His children ask for him every day," Rena wrote. "His baby will not know him at all as she was so young. They want to know when daddy is coming home and why does it take so long."

The letter portrayed Daniel as an ordinary American kid. Growing up, his mother said, he enjoyed fishing, camping and archaeology, as well as music and art. He entertained family and friends with his mimicry and rapping, she wrote.

She said her son held a number of jobs during his teenage years - delivering pizza, working in construction, as a security guard, and as a meat cutter.

Rena told the judge that she and other family members take particular offense to media reports that her son condoned the Sept. 11 attacks.

The Maldonado family was devastated by the 9/11 attacks, she said, as John Ogonowski, a pilot of American Airlines Flight 11 on Sept. 11, 2001, was a personal friend of the family.

"The lies told by the press about Danny agreeing with 9/11 is completely absurd and a complete lie," she wrote. "This bothers us probably more than anything else because it is so untrue."

Rena ended her letter with a personal plea for compassion from the judge, asking him to lessen Daniel's sentence and have him imprisoned closer to his family in New Hampshire.

"He is not a terrorist but a man that loves his family and his country," she said.

Despite the pleas of Maldonado's mother, federal prosecutor Abe Martinez thinks it is unlikely that he will serve his time anywhere close to New Hampshire.

"I think he's going to a high security federal prison, possibly supermax," he said referring to the supermax prison in Florence, Colo., that holds some of the most notorious terrorists, including Zacarias Moussaoui, Unabomber Theodore Kaczynski and British shoe bomber Richard Reid.

Incarcerated there are "a who's who of terrorists," Martinez said.

Supermax describes the most secure type of custody, where prisoners are let out of their cells only for brief periods or kept in solitary confinement.

Martinez said the FBI and Bureau of Prisons will monitor Maldonado for possible recruitment or proselytizing while he is in prison.

"We are going to watch him closely over the next 10 years," he said.

Martinez expects a decision on where Maldonado will be imprisoned within the next two weeks.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.