After Three Years’ Confinement, Immigrant Nasser Ahmed Learns Substance of “Secret Charges”

By Jane Adas

Nasser Ahmed has been living a nightmare. For nearly three years he has been held in solitary confinement under charges based on secret evidence to which neither he nor his lawyers have had complete access. This is not happening in some rogue country. It is happening here in the United States and is in part a consequence of the 1996 Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, passed on the first anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing.

Nasser Ahmed immigrated to the United States from Egypt in 1986 with his wife, Salwa, a physician. The couple settled in Brooklyn, where their three children were born, and became active members of the Abu Bakr mosque. In 1990 Nasser was elected to the board of directors of the mosque and served as its treasurer.

The majority of the members of the Abu Bakr mosque are Egyptian. It is their custom to invite scholars from Egypt to lecture at the mosque, especially during the month of Ramadan. One of the invited speakers was Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, an outspoken critic of human rights abuses by the Egyptian government, many of which have been documented by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.

As a result of the World Trade Center bombing and after another alleged plot to bomb tunnels connecting New York City and New Jersey, the United States tried and convicted Sheikh Abdel Rahman of seditious conspiracy to commit terrorist acts. Nasser Ahmed served as one of the court-appointed paralegals and translators for the defense at the sheikh’s trial.

In the course of the trial, FBI agents tried to recruit Nasser to cooperate with them in their case against the sheikh. When Nasser refused, the agents first threatened him and his family with deportation, then the INS (Immigration and Naturalization Service) arrested him. He was released on bond and returned to the sheikh’s defense team.

The INS again arrested Nasser in April 1996, after the trial was completed, and placed him in solitary confinement in the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan. Two years later, in response to two demonstrations outside the center organized by the Committee for Justice for Nasser Ahmed,* Nasser was moved to the federal prison at Otisville in upstate New York, again in solitary confinement and two hours away from his family. His wife, Salwa, said he was transported by helicopter with heavy security as though he were a dangerous criminal. She described how much more difficult it is now for her and their children to visit Nasser. To protest the move, Nasser undertook a hunger strike. He lost 25 pounds before being transferred to a hospital where he was force fed.

After his second arrest and incarceration, Nasser applied for bond and political asylum. In May 1996 he was denied bond on the basis of the U.S. government’s secret evidence. In May 1997 the immigration judge, Donn Livingston, found that Nasser would undoubtedly be subjected to torture if he were returned to Egypt, but felt compelled to deny asylum on the basis of secret evidence. Judge Livingston had urged the government to provide security clearances for Nasser’s lawyers so that they could review the charges. When this was refused, he ordered the INS to provide an unclassified summary of the charges to Nasser’s lawyers. The government responded with a single sentence stating that Nasser was associated with an unnamed terrorist organization, which Judge Livingston characterized as largely useless information.

Nasser’s defense lawyers, attorneys Lewis Bogard, David Cole, Abdeen Jabara, Lynn Stewart, and Larry Schilling, all of whom are providing their services pro bono, then challenged the government’s use of secret evidence in federal court. As a result, federal prosecutors named the terrorist organization—el-Gama’a el-Islamiyya (the Islamic Group)—and promised to release some of the secret evidence that it had provided during the bond and asylum hearings.

On Dec. 15-16, 1998, the case was sent back to Immigration Court for a new hearing before Judge Livingston. In his opening statement for the defense, Cole stated that the INS has gradually declassified some evidence but added more at every step, making it difficult for Nasser and his lawyers to respond to the four known allegations against him:

1. On the evidence of an unnamed agent, the government accused Nasser Ahmed of association with the “terrorist organization” el-Gama’a el-Islamiyya (the Islamic Group).

The defense called Neil Hicks, the senior program co-ordinator for the Middle East of the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, to testify about the nature of the Islamic Group and the Egyptian government’s response to Islamists. Hicks described el-Gama’a el-Islamiyya as an informal umbrella organization that comprises hundreds of groups having in common opposition to the current Egyptian government. The majority of the groups provide basic social services, such as health care and education, while only a small percentage endorse violence.

However, Hicks testified, the Egyptian government does not distinguish between the peaceful and the violent groups in its oppression of them. And the U.S. State Department’s inclusion of el-Gama’a el-Islamiyya as a “radical, extremist, violent Egyptian group” in its Oct. 9, 1997 designation of a “Network of Clandestine Extremist Islamist Groups” leaves out most of the people involved. Judge Livingston compared it to the 1960s anti-war movement, which was not itself formally organized but included many smaller specific groups.

2. The government also alleged that Nasser Ahmed tried to obtain a bomb manual to send abroad.

In his role as a paralegal in Sheikh Abdel Rahman’s trial, Nasser was exposed to many non-classified bombing manuals, but they were not among the materials that he translated. Nasser testified that in the course of that trial he reviewed the raw material of informants, which suggested that “anyone who shook hands with [the sheikh] was asked to make a bomb.” He denies even reading a bomb manual, let alone sending one out of the country.

3. The government further charges that Nasser Ahmed relayed a threat by Sheikh Abdel Rahman while in federal prison in Springfield, Missouri, to the outside world that led to a bomb attack in Cairo.

Nasser denies transmitting the sheikh’s complaints about ill treatment in prison to the press. In any case, the Cairo bombing was described at the time as a response to Israel’s 1996 Operation Grapes of Wrath attack on Lebanon.

4. Finally, the government charged that Nasser Ahmed threatened the imam of the Abu Bakr mosque.

Sheikh Mohammed El-Sharif was brought over from Egypt to be imam of the Abu Bakr mosque in April 1995. The board of the mosque had previously invited others, but the Egyptian government always refused to give any of them an exit permit.

Members of the mosque became uneasy when they learned that Sheikh El-Sharif had visited the Egyptian Embassy and met with security officers there. He also began accusing the board of stealing mosque funds and of being terrorists. The board attempted to dismiss him with six-months’ salary and an airline ticket to Egypt, but El-Sharif refused to leave. He sued the board, and when a new board was elected, sued them and labeled them terrorists as well.

Two examples of prosecution tactics are: when an INS lawyer asked a member of the Abu Bakr mosque, who had been brought in to testify on Nasser Ahmed’s behalf, whether he had ever been arrested, he responded “no.” She shot back, “How many times?” The same lawyer asked Nasser Ahmed, “If the Abu Bakr mosque is innocent, why has the FBI had it under surveillance from 1992 to the present?”

As an FBI informant, Sheikh El-Sharif was summoned by both the prosecution and the defense to testify. He speaks no English and, because of problems with the translator and also the judge’s need to talk to other government confidential witnesses, the trial was postponed for a month. In addition, on Dec. 4, 1998 the government added a fifth charge: that Nasser committed immigration fraud from 1987 to 1990, a federal criminal offense.

Around 4:30 p.m. on the second day of the trial, Dec. 16th, several armed federal marshals entered and positioned themselves around the courtroom. It seemed strange until participants and spectators learned later that the United States had begun bombing Iraq.

*The Committee for Justice for Nasser Ahmed, P.O. Box 141096, Staten Island, NY 10314. (Ahmed Sattar) telephone (718) 442-3513; e-mail: Isattar@aol.com.

Jane Adas is a free-lance writer living in the New York metropolitan area.