Lawyer for imam charged in alleged terrorism plot says he is a scapegoat
Tina Susman, Josh Meyer, LA Times
September 21, 2009
Attorney Ron Kuby says his client cooperated with investigators. A hearing for the imam, who along with two other Afghan immigrants is being charged with lying to federal agents, was delayed today.
Reporting from Washington and New York – The government has targeted a Queens imam as a scapegoat for its failings to investigate an alleged cross-country terrorist plot, his lawyer said before his client’s hearing in federal court was delayed today.
Ahmad Wais Afzali, who is accused of lying to federal investigators, will continue to be held. The hearing is scheduled to resume on Thursday.
Afzali was not wearing handcuffs when he entered the courtroom in Brooklyn. He blew kisses and waved at relatives, including his father, wife and sister who were in court. They waved back.
In his brief appearance, Afzali said he understood the charges against him. He spoke softly and politely and appeared dressed in sandals, a flowing top and baggy trousers.
Afzali, who was arrested Sunday, is one of three men scheduled to appear today in federal court in the probe, details of which have been dribbling out for the last week. Najibullah Zazi, 24, and his 53-year-old father, Mohammed Wali Zazi, were arrested Saturday in Denver and will face charges of lying as well. All were born in Afghanistan and were living legally in the United States.
Lying “is the favorite default charge” when there are no other viable charges, said Ron Kuby, a noted civil rights attorney who represents Afzali, 37. Speaking to reporters before the hearing, Kuby said that his client had fully cooperated with federal investigators
The charges against Afzali allege that during a phone conversation on Sept. 11, he told Najibullah Zazi that agents had been asking about him. In the same conversation, Afzali noted that the phone call was being monitored. Six days later, the FBI alleges that Afzali denied telling Najibullah Zazi about his conversations with investigators.
Kuby said it made no sense that Afzali would have lied about a phone conversation that he already had acknowledged was being monitored.
“Why on earth is the imam going to lie to the FBI about the contents of a conversation that he knows they recorded?” said Kuby, noting that Afzali had cooperated with agents by providing DNA samples, permitting two searches of his home and letting them measure his shoes.
According to Kuby, Afzali has been in the United States since 1981, when he came as a child with his family. He has relatives, including a first wife and children, who live in Virginia, and because of his activities as a Muslim community leader in Queens, he had occasionally been called upon by the Joint Terrorism Task Force to help in investigations.
Kuby described his cooperation as relatively limited, such as responding when agents asked him about certain individuals. He did not get paid or have any deals with agents in exchange for information, which Kuby said he had provided “periodically” over several years. “He’s not a junior G-man. He wasn’t trained at Quantico. He was just a religious leader who the government went to for help,” Kuby said.
Najibullah Zazi is at the center of the investigation. New York City police and the FBI moved aggressively to investigate the Afghan immigrant last week before the men could take significant steps to launch such a plot, officials said. As a result, there is much that the U.S. government doesn’t know about the men’s intentions, or their possible connections to a wider network of militants here and overseas, especially in Pakistan, officials acknowledged.
“You can’t make a definitive statement about how big this is because it’s unclear how much more is going to come out,” said a law enforcement official involved in the inquiry. Like others, the official spoke on condition of anonymity, citing the urgency and secrecy of the investigation and the search for more suspects.
But the official added: “There is a lot more to come. This isn’t over by any means.”
Authorities are sifting through evidence from raids at numerous locations in New York and Colorado, including Najibullah Zazi’s laptop and other computers, cellphones and other electronic devices. And Zazi, an airport shuttle bus driver living in the Denver suburb of Aurora, had been cooperating with the FBI and other authorities, FBI affidavits unsealed Sunday indicate.
The three were charged with deliberately making false statements to federal agents investigating the alleged terrorist plot, a charge that carries a maximum penalty of eight years in prison. All are to appear in court today.
In announcing the charges early Sunday morning, Assistant U.S. Atty. Gen. David Kris said agents were working around the clock, domestically and internationally, in “an ongoing and fast-paced investigation.”
Though Kris acknowledged that the Justice Department had “no specific information regarding the timing, location or target of any planned attack,” he and other officials said they believed the alleged plot focused on detonating explosives somewhere in the U.S.
Some media reports have quoted authorities as saying that the target may have been a sports arena, mass transit hub or other “soft” civilian target with huge crowds.
But Najibullah Zazi’s potential role remains murky.
In public comments before his arrest, he said he was a hard-working and devout Muslim who loved America.
Authorities alleged in court documents unsealed Sunday that they had found handwritten formulas and instructions for making bombs, detonators and fuses during a search of Zazi’s computer. That occurred sometime after he was stopped Sept. 10 in what authorities said was a random drug check while driving on New York’s George Washington Bridge, on a trip from Colorado.
Someone using those diagrams could make bombs of the same size and type as those used in the deadly 2005 attacks on London’s transit system, officials said.
Zazi said he might have accidentally downloaded the bomb materials as part of a religious book. But authorities said in charging documents that the handwriting was consistent with Zazi’s, and that the materials had been e-mailed between Internet accounts linked to him, including one that originated in Pakistan.
The affidavits say Zazi denied that he had seen or written the handwritten notes on his computer. Agents also allegedly found Zazi’s fingerprints on a scale and double-A batteries seized during a raid in Queens on Sept. 14.
The FBI affidavit raises questions about Afzali’s connections to Zazi and other men under suspicion. It suggests that the FBI believes he tipped off Zazi to the investigation after being brought to NYPD offices and shown pictures of Zazi “and others,” based on an intercepted phone call between the men last week.
For the first few days of the investigation, Zazi and his lawyer, Arthur Folsom, insisted that Zazi had no ties to terrorism and that he had rented a car to drive from Colorado to New York this month to resolve a business arrangement gone sour. Zazi had lived in New York until January, when he moved to Colorado. He also said he had gone to Pakistan several times in the last two years simply to visit his wife in Peshawar, a haven for Al Qaeda and militants who support the group.
But the investigation took a dramatic turn when Zazi, during three days of intensive FBI questioning, admitted that he had received weapons and explosives training from Al Qaeda in Pakistan last year, according to the FBI affidavit.
That alleged admission, and what officials call some of Zazi’s other confessions, put authorities on red alert.
More arrests are expected, officials said, but they don’t know exactly what they are looking for. The FBI and U.S. intelligence agencies have mobilized more aggressively than at any time since September 2001, one senior counter-terrorism official said, in part because “we don’t know what we don’t know.”
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September 29th, 2009 at 2:41 am
[...] Obama’s downfall | Media hypes terror plot, despite the fact no one is charged with terror | Lawyer for imam charged in alleged terrorism plot says he is a scapegoat | Judge eases restrictions on Harkat | Second Toronto 18 suspect pleads guilty | Canada sees [...]