Feds to drop charges against Lodi terror suspect
Federal prosecutors moved Friday to dismiss charges against Hamid Hayat, who spent 14 years in prison in a nowtarnished case that was once touted as a hallmark of the government’s war on terrorism.
Hayat, of Lodi, was convicted in 2006 of supporting terrorists by training with them in Pakistan, his family homeland, and was sentenced to 24 years in prison. The main evidence against him was his videotaped statement to FBI agents in 2005 that two years earlier he had attended a terrorist training camp for three to six months during a family visit to Pakistan.
During his trial in Sacramento, his lawyer said the confession had been coerced by investigators who asked leading questions during a daylong interrogation. Later, attorneys appealing the conviction said his trial lawyer had failed to contact a half dozen Pakistani witnesses who would have testified that he had never left his family’s village for more than a week during their stay.
Jurors also heard a translation of a note, written in Arabic, that was in Hayat’s wallet when he returned from Pakistan. It read, “Oh Allah, we place you at their throats and we seek refuge in you from their evils.” Prosecutors said the note showed a jihadist mindset.
But Hayat’s appellate lawyers said his trial attorney had failed to contact expert witnesses, who would have said the note was part of a common prayer, with no sinister meaning.
U.S. District Judge Garland Burrell, who presided over Hayat’s trial, overturned his conviction in July, saying his right to a competent defense had been violated by his inexperienced attorney’s failure to call alibi witnesses. He was released soon afterward from federal prison in Arizona while awaiting prosecutors’ decision on whether to retry him.
In a statement Friday, U.S. Attorney McGregor Scott’s office said its prosecutors and the Justice Department’s National Security Division had carefully reviewed the case and the evidence that would be available at a retrial.
“Having concluded that review, we have determined that the passage of time and the interests of justice counsel against resurrecting this 15yearold case,” Scott’s office said.
After Hayat’s conviction, thenAttorney General Alberto Gonzales had issued a statement saying, “Justice has been served against a man who supported and trained with our terrorist enemies in pursuit of his goal of violent jihad.”
The FBI started investigating Muslims in Lodi shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and said Hayat and his father, Umer Hayat, were part of a terrorist cell there. A prosecution witness in Hayat’s case was a paid informant who, before focusing on Hayat, reported seeing Osama bin Laden’s chief deputy at a Lodi mosque as late as 1999.
The Justice Department later admitted that there had been no terrorist cell in Lodi.
Umer Hayat, an ice cream vendor, pleaded guilty to charges of lying to customs agents and served less than a year in jail.
Hayat’s appellate lawyers, including Dennis Riordan and Donald Horgan of Oakland, said they are grateful for the prosecutors’ decision, but “the 14 years Hamid spent behind bars on charges of which he was innocent remain a grave miscarriage of justice. They serve as a stark example of how, in the post9/11 era, the government’s effort to protect the public from terrorism could and in this case did go terribly wrong.”
“An innocent man spent nearly 14 years in prison, a family was torn apart and an entire community was left traumatized due to prosecution taking advantage of antiMuslim, post9/11 hysteria,” said Basim Ekarra, executive director of the Sacramento Valley office of the Council on AmericanIslamic Relations.
Hayat, 37, said he learned of the decision from Riordan, who congratulated him and told him the case was over. “I didn’t believe it,” he said in a statement released by his supporters. “Honestly, it was like a dream.”