Tech Student Repeatedly Misled Counterterrorism Agents

Hmmm…  So, what else is new?

Agents say Tech student accused of terrorist ties lied
Magistrate is listening to interview tapes to determine whether to suppress them

By BILL RANKIN
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Published on: 01/14/08

Terrorism defendant Syed Haris Ahmed repeatedly misled counterterrorism agents when they initially interviewed him in March 2006, an FBI agent testified Monday.

When Ahmed, then a 21-year-old Georgia Tech mechanical engineering student, was asked why he had visited Pakistan in the summer of 2005, Ahmed said it was to study the Koran. Instead, Ahmed would tell agents days later, he went there to get military training, “maybe at a terrorist training camp,” FBI Special Agent Mark D. Richards testified.

Richards and fellow counterterrorism agent Khalid Sediqi explained during a hearing Monday the context of their interviews with Ahmed, a terrorist suspect living near the Georgia Tech campus. Over three days of hearings this week, a U.S. magistrate is listening to the secretly taped interviews agents had with Ahmed to decide whether Ahmed’s statements should be suppressed.

Ahmed and co-defendant Ehsanul Islam Sadequee of Roswell stand charged in the first international terrorism case brought in Georgia. Both men, who have pleaded not guilty, are accused of giving material support to terrorist groups. They are being held without bond pending trial.

Richards and Sediqi first approached Ahmed, as he returned from classes, on the morning of March 11, 2006, outside the house Ahmed was renting near the Georgia Tech campus. They initially asked Ahmed about some PVC pipe he had purchased at Home Depot and asked if he planned to make a bomb with it.

Ahmed, who did not know the agents were secretly recording the conversation, said he bought the pipe for his house, because the plumbing wasn’t working.

Richards testified that the agents’ primary reasons for talking to Ahmed was to learn all they could about his possible terrorist activity and to gain Ahmed’s cooperation. Agents also were concerned about Sadequee, who was then in Bangladesh, and whether he was plotting an attack, Richards said.

A counterterrorism task force had been investigating the activities of both men, keeping a close watch on Ahmed in Atlanta. But the task force’s intelligence was drying up and the agents decided they needed to interview Ahmed face-to-face, Richards testified.

Not long into the conversation, Richards bluntly asked Ahmed, “Are you a terrorist?”

“No,” Ahmed answered, his voice dropping.

They also asked him whether he tried to enter a terrorism training camp for Osama Bin Laden in Pakistan.

“No,” Ahmed answered again.

But Richards testified that, four days later, Ahmed told agents he went to Pakistan with the hope to be “recruited into a jihad training camp” so he could fight “Muslim oppressors everywhere.”

The agents also asked Ahmed whether he had been to Washington. Only Seattle, Ahmed responded.

Richards said agents believed Ahmed had traveled to Washington, D.C., in April 2005 and made “casing videos” of several national landmarks, including the Capitol. In fact, Richards testified, Ahmed would later go get the camera that took those videos — videos that wound up on the computer of a terrorism suspect later convicted in Great Britain.

Agents also asked Ahmed why he and Sadequee traveled to Canada in March 2005. To visit relatives, including his and Sadequee’s, Ahmed told the agents. But Richards testified that Ahmed and Sadequee met in Toronto with “known terrorist extremists,” some of whom are either convicted or under investigation.

And even though the agents told Ahmed after his interviews not to contact Sadequee, Ahmed did just that, first on a phone call and later by sending an e-mail from a computer at a public library in Forsyth County, Richards said.

Five days after Ahmed’s final interview with agents at FBI headquarters, he was indicted and arrested on terrorism charges.

Ahmed’s lawyer, Jack Martin, contends Ahmed’s statements, which will continue to be played in court over the next few days, should be suppressed. Martin says that Ahmed’s statements were “involuntary” because agents coerced Ahmed into talking on the false promise he would not be arrested if he cooperated.

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