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Chicago Tribune - August 17, 2005
Terror-trial attorneys cite FBI's doubts about informant
By Matt O'Connor
CHICAGO - A key government informant in a high-profile terrorism case here was caught in a lie in an unrelated investigation, prompting the FBI to question the informant's reliability, according to records made public Tuesday.
Citing the FBI's own concerns, lawyers for Muhammad Salah, a Bridgeview man charged with financing terrorism by Hamas in the Mideast, are seeking to throw out portions of the indictment that rely on the word of the informant.
Salah, identified by authorities as a member of Hamas, and two other Palestinians were charged last August in Chicago with laundering and disbursing more than $1 million to support the violent aims of the militant Islamic group.
The indictment accused Salah of directing the undisclosed informant, a Chicago associate, to scout terrorist targets in Israel in October 1999.
That would have come more than a year after FBI agents seized about $1.4 million in assets in a highly publicized civil lawsuit against Salah and the Quranic Literacy Institute, an Oak Lawn-based publisher of sacred Islamic texts.
According to a 2003 FBI report attached to this week's defense filing, the same informant also alleged he knew of an unrelated terrorist plot in 1997 to bring down an Israeli commercial airliner at O'Hare International Airport.
The informant claimed he accompanied the target of that probe to an intersection just south of O'Hare to provide surveillance of an El Al jet at mid-day on Sept. 3, 1997.
But six years later, the FBI, after re-opening the probe following the Iraq War, discovered from El Al records that the airline's only two flights at O'Hare that day weren't close to mid-day.
"The unreliability of this information significantly impacts" the investigation into the alleged El Al plot, said the FBI report, which was turned over to the defense by the government as part of discovery in the Salah prosecution.
"This fact raises further concerns for the case" against Salah, the FBI report continued. "These cases are also singularly based" on the word of the informant, the FBI added…..
The report also described the informant's account of the various terrorist plots as "eerily repetitive in each case."
In each case the informant claimed the alleged terrorist leader "engages in mysterious and clandestine behavior," the FBI report said. Eventually, the terrorist leaders recruit the informant "to go on special missions overseas on behalf of the organization," the report added.
The FBI report went on to recommend that the informant "not be used in further FBI investigation unless independently corroborated."
Despite the warning, Salah was charged in part based on the informant's word, his lawyers contended.
"The prosecution appears to have disregarded the alarm bell that was sounded by the FBI," said the defense motion written by attorneys Michael Deutsch of Chicago and Robert Bloom of Oakland…..
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