Friday, October 14, 2011

Charge dropped in Somali funds trial

Because of an apparent typo, federal prosecutors Thursday dismissed one of the charges against a Rochester woman accused of helping raise money for a group fighting Somalia's fledgling government.

The count accused the woman of making a false statement to FBI agents on a date she never spoke with them.

Hawo Mohamed Hassan had faced three counts of lying to the FBI, as well as a single count of conspiracy to provide material support to the Islamic group al-Shabaab, which the U.S. government has designated a foreign terrorist organization.

But at the start of the eighth day of the trial of Hassan and co-defendant Amina Farah Ali, Justice Department lawyer Steven Ward asked Chief U.S. District Judge Michael Davis to dismiss one of the counts that accused her of lying.

Ward offered no reason. The defense raised no objection. Davis dismissed the count.

But the later testimony of an FBI agent gave a possible indication why. He testified that agents interviewed Hassan, 64, on three occasions - July 13, 2009, as agents searched her home, and again Sept. 2 and 9, 2009.

Count 16 of the July 2010 indictment against Hassan and Ali alleged Hassan made a false statement to the FBI on Sept. 14. There was no interview that day.

The dismissal came as Ward and Assistant U.S. Attorney Jeffrey Paulsen began winding down their case against Ali and Hassan. The government's sixth and final witness was FBI Special Agent Kevin McGrane, one of the agents who questioned Hassan.

His cross-examination by the defense was expected to end today, and then attorneys for Ali and Hassan will begin presenting their cases.

Both women face a charge of conspiracy to provide material support to al-Shabaab. Ali faces 12 additional counts of providing material aid for allegedly sending or having others send payments totalling $8,608 to people in Somalia between September 2008 and July 2009.

Hassan now faces two counts of making false statements to the FBI in addition to conspiracy.

Neither Dan Scott, who represents Ali, nor Thomas Kelly and Gretchen Gurstelle, who represent Hassan, have said whether their clients will testify. Before trial, both defendants had filed motions to sever the cases, claiming neither could get a fair trial if they were tried in tandem, and the issue arose again during McGrane's testimony.

The agent had testified about the questioning of Hassan. The reports he and another agent later wrote summarizing those interviews mention Ali, and Scott contends the alleged statements implicate Ali in possible crimes.

A defendant has a constitutional right to confront his or her accuser. But since the accuser in this instance is a co-defendant who may choose not to testify, Scott has argued that offering the statements violate Ali's right to confrontation.

"She's shifting as much blame as possible away from herself and onto my client," Scott told Davis of Hassan in a hearing after the jury had been dismissed for the day. He said that while it was OK for a defendant to deny blame, "shifting it to my client? Huh-uh."

Paulsen argued that U.S. Supreme Court precedent permits use of a defendant's statements unless they are "clearly incriminating" to the co-defendant, and he argued Hassan's alleged statements didn't rise to that level.

Davis agreed but said he would instruct the jury today on how to regard Hassan's statements about Ali.

While defense attorneys have readily acknowledged both women were tireless fundraisers for orphans and the needy in their East African homeland, they say the women never intended to fund terrorists.

To prove the conspiracy count, Paulsen and Ward must convince the jury that the women knew al-Shabaab had been designated as a terrorist group (the designation came in February 2008), or that they were sending money to a group engaged in terrorist activities, or to a group that used terrorism.

During their case, Paulsen and Ward presented nearly 100 phone calls involving the women in which they discuss the fundraising and sending money to Somalia. The calls were culled from 30,000 phone calls the FBI secretly recorded from a wiretap on Ali's two telephones during a 10-month period.

In some of the calls, Ali spoke with al-Shabaab officials in Somalia, the government alleged.

Somalia is a shambles after years of civil war, coups, fighting among clans, failed governments, droughts and famine. Al-Shabaab controls much of the southern part of the country, and it has waged guerrilla war against the U.N.-backed Transitional Federal Government.

Al-Shabaab has opposed the government, largely because it believes it was orchestrated by neighboring Ethiopia, Somalia's neighbor and longtime enemy. That enmity turned to violence when the government called in Ethiopian troops to quell violence and retake the capital of Mogadishu.

The women raised money through door-to-door solicitations and teleconferences that included hundreds of listeners. Ali and Hassan are among 20 people with Twin Cities or Minnesota ties who have been named in federal charges for allegedly aiding al-Shabaab, particularly in the exodus of young local Somali men back to their homeland to fight.

The charges in the other cases have painted the Twin Cities as a hotbed of recruitment for al-Shabaab, but there's been no testimony in the case against Ali and Hassan involving the alleged recruiting effort; if anything, the testimony has tended to call that portrait into question.

In a May 6, 2009, phone call played for the jury, Ali complained to Hassan that not only was fundraising next to impossible among Minneapolis' Somali community, but that officials at the city's largest Somali mosque refused to help when women came to raise funds for the fighters.

"Yes, they chased them away, sister," Ali told Hassan in the tape, according to an FBI English-langauge transcript.

David Hanners can be reached at 612-338-6516.

Source: The TwinCities.com

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