Justice Disputes Key Terror Case Evidence

By SARAH KARUSH and JOHN SOLOMON
Aug 12, 12:28 PM (ET)

The Bush administration's already troubled case against an accused terror cell
in Detroit is being dealt another blow with revelations that a witness came
forward after the trial to undercut a key piece of video evidence presented to
jurors.

Lawyers and Justice Department officials said Wednesday night that a man shown
in a videotape of landmarks in New York, Las Vegas and California has told
investigators the tape was an amateur film and not surveillance as prosecutors
portrayed at the trial of four suspected terrorists.

The witness interview was conducted in January, months after the trial in
Detroit ended, and was turned over this summer to defense lawyers. It could deal
a significant blow to the Bush administration's first major terror prosecution
since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

The Justice Department is nearing completion of a monthslong review of
prosecutors' conduct during the case, and a judge will rule on a defense request
to reverse the convictions of three men.

"During the course of this review, information has come to the government's
attention that we were obligated to turn over the defense, and we did so,"
Justice spokesman Mark Corallo said Wednesday night. "The review is ongoing and
at the end of the day, the government will do the right thing based on the facts
and the evidence."

Though both sides have known about the witness interview for some time, they
were precluded from disclosing it because of a judge's gag order. Both sides
confirmed it Wednesday after the judge lifted the gag order because one of the
original prosecutors in the case, Richard Convertino, granted an interview to
The Associated Press this week.

James Thomas, a lawyer for one of the Detroit defendants, said the new witness
testimony undercuts one of the key pieces of evidence used against his
client. "It was an amateurish video taken by school kids," Thomas said.

Justice officials said their review has turned up several problems with the
original prosecution.

"Since the discovery of the tape in Detroit in 2001 and up until recently, the
Justice Department's experts believed the footage was terrorist surveillance,
but the information that has come to light calls into question those
conclusions," a Justice official said, speaking only on condition of anonymity
because the internal investigation is still under way.

William Sullivan, a lawyer for Convertino, said his client had shown the tape to
numerous Justice experts who told him it was consistent with other terror
surveillance. "He was never presented with any evidence that contradicted those
experts' assessments," Sullivan said.

Convertino is now under investigation in the case.

In a jury verdict last summer hailed by the Bush administration as the breakup
of a terror cell, Karim Koubriti, 25, and Abdel-Ilah Elmardoudi, 38, were
convicted on terrorism and fraud charges, and Ahmed Hannan, 36, was convicted of
fraud. A fourth defendant, Farouk Ali-Haimoud, 24, was acquitted.

The convictions have been in doubt for months after Justice officials divulged
some documents that might have been helpful to defense lawyers weren't turned
over during the trial, and they removed the original prosecutors and put them
under investigation.

An FBI agent and other experts put on by the prosecution at the trial said the
tape appeared to be casing footage consistent with the way radical Muslim groups
have taught operatives to conduct surveillance.

But the defense has argued the tape belonged to someone else and showed innocent
tourism footage.

Justice officials said while the belated witness testimony calls into question
the Detroit tape, a second tape found by Spanish authorities in an al-Qaida
hideout in Madrid in 2002 that shows many of the same landmarks is still
regarded by U.S. officials as terror surveillance.

Both tapes, obtained by AP and aired nationally this week, show footage of
casino hotels in Las Vegas, Disneyland in California and several landmarks in
New York City, including the World Trade Center before it was attacked.

AP reported earlier this week that Justice Department documents from the time of
the Detroit trial show that repeated friction between Washington and Detroit
kept the government from showing the Spanish videotape and other evidence to the
jury.

In an interview with AP, Convertino alleged that "narrow-shouldered bureaucrats"
in Washington kept him from putting on a stronger case. Convertino also claimed
that Las Vegas authorities decided for economic reasons not to warn the public
in 2002 that Detroit and Spanish terror cells had footage of the casinos that
experts regarded as surveillance.

Las Vegas authorities acknowledged they were shown both tapes back in 2002, but
said their decision not to warn the public had nothing to do with
economics. "There are many factors that impact upon decisions pertaining to the
type and quality of information that should be disseminated ... but the monetary
impact of the information upon the local economy is not one of them," the
U.S. Attorney's Office in Las Vegas said Wednesday.

While Las Vegas authorities didn't issue a warning, California officials who
were told about the same Spanish video footage, which included the Golden Gate
Bridge, decided back in 2002 to go public with an alert.