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NY Post on Bronx Synagogue Plot Informant

By Ethan Brown

The New York Post has a useful little primer on the informant at the center of the alleged plot to bomb a Bronx synagogue. According to the Post, the informant is an upstate New York motel owner named Shahed Hussain.

Hussain became an informant after being busted on fraud charges; Hussain worked as a translator for the DMV and helped immigrants cheat on driver's tests. His bid to become an informant, according to the Post, was driven by a desire to win leniency on the fraud charges and avoid being deported to Pakistan. [More...]

Hussain also worked as an informant in a case against Yassin M. Aref, an Albany imam convicted on money laundering and terrorism charges in 2007.

In the Aref case, the government claimed that Aref and his co-defendant sought to launder money in a plot to purchase a shoulder-fired missile that was going to be used in an attack on the Pakistani Mission to the United Nations in New York. Aref claimed, however, that he was simply helping out a friend (informant Hussain, who then owned a pizza shop) with a loan.

There is little doubt, however, that the plot was entirely fictitious--the New York Times described it as a fake missile plot --and that it was hatched by the informant and not the defendants.

Yet another reason to be skeptical of the Bronx synagogue case and yet another reason to push the Justice Department to re-asses how it conducts anti-terrorism investigations.

As an attorney for Shahawar Matin Siraj--whose case I mentioned yesterday--once told me: "It's a sham that we conduct terrorism investigations by having informants create fictional terror plots."

For more on the Aref case, go here.

Full post as published by TalkLeft on May 22, 2009 (boomark / email).