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On Sept. 2, federal judge Gerald E. Rosen of Detroit threw out
the convictions of Moroccan nationals Abdel-Ilah Elmardoudi and
Karim Koubriti in a case once billed by Attorney General John
Ashcroft as a major victory in his administration’s “war on
terror.” Elmardoudi and Koubriti, who were convicted of terrorism
and document fraud in June 2003, remain in custody and face a new
trial on the fraud charges. Co-defendant Ahmed Hannan, also
Moroccan, was convicted of document fraud; he was released this
year to a halfway house on an electronic tether. A fourth man was
acquitted in the case.
The reversal came a day after federal prosecutors handed in a
nine-month review ordered by the judge and asked that he overturn
the convictions. Prosecutors blame missteps in the case on
Richard Convertino, who was removed last year as lead prosecutor
and is under investigation [see INB 2/7/04]. “The prosecution
committed a pattern of mistakes and oversights that deprived the
defendants of discoverable evidence” and “created a record filled
with misleading inferences that such material did not exist,” the
review found. David Cole, a Georgetown University law professor,
said the Detroit case “fits into a broader pattern of the
Ashcroft Justice Department overplaying its hand in terror cases
and making broad allegations of terror without the evidence to
back it up.” [New York Times 9/2/04, 9/3/04]
