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Detainment inquiry { August 17 2002 } Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A28838-2002Aug16.htmlhttp://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A28838-2002Aug16.html
Judge Orders Inquiry Into Detainment of Egyptian
By Christine Haughney
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, August 17, 2002; Page A02
NEW YORK, Aug. 16 -- A U.S. district judge has ordered federal prosecutors here to investigate the case of an Egyptian national who claims an FBI agent badgered him into confessing that he possessed an aviation radio that could have been used to help terrorists steer airplanes into the World Trade Center last year.
In newly unsealed court records, Judge Jed S. Rakoff said the FBI may have "misled him" about the case of Abdallah Higazy, 31, who was held in solitary confinement for 31 days early this year before his release from jail. Another man, who had no connection to the attacks, later claimed the radio was his.
"The court . . . was apparently seriously misled on two occasions in connection with the detention of Mr. Higazy as a material witness," Rakoff said at a closed hearing March 18. "At a minimum, one would think that some explanation would be forthcoming as to how a false confession could have been obtained."
The records were unsealed at the request of the New York Times. Today, FBI spokesman James Margolin declined to comment.
Higazy was arrested Dec. 17 when he returned to pick up his bags at the Millennium Hilton Hotel, where he had been staying at the time of the Sept. 11 attacks. The hotel, across from the World Trade Center, had been evacuated, and guests were allowed in three months later to pick up their belongings.
FBI agents arrested Higazy for keeping an aviation radio in his hotel room, which faced the towers. For 31 days, he was kept in solitary confinement with other accused terrorists in the attacks.
Throughout his case, Higazy insisted he was innocent and that the radio did not belong to him. The son of an Egyptian diplomat, Higazy spent half his childhood living in the Washington area and returned to the United States on a USAID-sponsored program to get his master's degree in computer engineering. The USAID program was paying for his stay at the hotel until he could find housing.
Higazy offered to take a polygraph test to prove his innocence. But immediately after a Dec. 27 polygraph, an FBI agent who remains unidentified in the unsealed documents, told Higazy's attorney, Robert Dunn, that his client had confessed to owning the radio.
According to a Jan. 28 letter from Dunn to the judge, the FBI agent emerged from a 31/2-hour polygraph session and said, "Well, I don't have a polygraph test, but I do have a confession."
The agent claimed that Higazy gave three different explanations for where he found the radio. Higazy said he found the radio in a subway station near City Hall; that he found it underneath the Brooklyn Bridge; and that he had stolen it from the Egyptian Air Corps, where he had served.
When Dunn went in to ask Higazy about the polygraph and his confession, the lawyer said his client was "trembling and sobbing uncontrollably" and was uncertain what he said.
"All he knew was that the agent had threatened the safety and security of both his family in Egypt as well as his younger brother who was attending school upstate and he did acquiesce/admit some connection to the radio," Dunn wrote. "He again insisted that he had no connection to the device but felt he had no choice but to make some kind of admission relative to the radio in an effort to remove his family from harm's way."
On Jan. 11, prosecutors formally charged Higazy with lying to investigators about whether the radio belonged to him. Federal officials paraded him before the media as a terrorist, and one federal agent swore that hotel security officers found the radio with Higazy's Egyptian passport and an "Arabic book."
Three days later an American pilot returned to the Millennium Hilton Hotel to pick up his belongings and notified officials that his aviation radio was missing. Prosecutors quickly went to court, and Higazy was released in prison scrubs with $3 in subway fare.
In February, a hotel security guard pleaded guilty to lying that he had found the pilot's radio in the safe in Higazy's hotel room. In the newly released papers, Rakoff said he considered appointing a special prosecutor to look at the FBI's conduct. Instead, he ordered the U.S. attorney's office to report back to him by Oct. 31.
Prosecutors disputed that Higazy had been threatened during his polygraph and pointed out that Dunn had consented twice to Higazy being tested.
"The notion that any agency, foreign or domestic, serves such a function is simply preposterous and doesn't warrant further comment," said U.S. attorney's office spokesman Herb Hadad.
Court records show they felt more regretful about the case.
"Obviously the government is terribly troubled by how this case unfolded," Assistant U.S. Attorney David Kelly told Rakoff at the March 18 hearing. "It is the nightmare that we have all experienced as prosecutors, hoping it would never come true, and this is that instance where it did come true."
Higazy's wife, Nafeesah Muhaimin, wrote in an e-mail to a reporter today that he remains "very angry" that prosecutors still questioned that he had been threatened.
"After all this they actually have the nerve to implicitly call him a liar by denying that a threat concerning his family was given," she said. "With all due respect, they weren't in the room with Abdallah and the polygraph examiner."
© 2002 The Washington Post Company
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