Police fabricated evidence to incriminate five Americans facing trial in Pakistan on terror charges, lawyers representing the men will argue in court this week.
The men, all Muslims, were arrested last year in December in the central town of Sargodha, and have been charged with planning terrorist acts in Pakistan, Afghanistan and the US.
While the men admit wanting to travel to Afghanistan, they deny involvement in any jihadist activities and say they were planning to carry out “community work” in the country.
Defense lawyers will argue the men could not have made e-mail contact with a Pakistani extremist linked to al-Qaeda in the way the police claim. According to the police’s own summary of the investigation submitted to the court, investigators discovered the e-mail account which was allegedly used to make contact several days after police had briefed journalists on the messages.
Similarly, the police report describes the discovery of maps of alleged target sites and other incriminating evidence more than two weeks after the police had already told media about their existence.
The defense will also call into question police claims about the date of the men’s arrest, which is several days after their widely reported detention on Dec. 9. Umer Farooq, 24, Waqar Hussain Khan, 22, Ramy Zamzam, 22, Ahmed Minni, 20, and Aman Hassan Yemer, 18, were charged under anti-terrorism laws. Police say the group’s intended target was Chashma Barrage, a complex located near nuclear power facilities in Punjab that includes a water reservoir and other structures.
The men, who pleaded not guilty, face life sentences if convicted on the most serious of the charges.
All of them grew up in the suburbs of Washington, where they were a tight-knit, religious group of friends. The Farooqs are originally from Sargodha and the men claim they had traveled to the Pakistani town to attend Umer’s arranged marriage.
Police said the men were taken into custody on Dec. 9, but were allowed to go home each evening and were only formally arrested five days later on Dec. 14, but there are no reported sightings of the men after Dec. 9.
Farooq’s father, Khalid, who was held nearly three weeks before he was released, said that all of them were in continuous police custody after Dec. 8.
“I was with the boys, in the same cell,” he said. “There’s no question of them being allowed out.”
Following the arrest of the men, police gave on-the-record briefings on Dec. 10 and Dec. 11 to local and international media about a Yahoo e-mail account used to communicate with a Pakistani extremist called Saifullah.
They also said at the time that maps and jihadi literature were found with the men. However, according to the police report lodged with the anti-terrorism court in Sargodha, where the men are being tried, it was only on Dec. 17 that the suspects disclosed “their secret e-mail address along with password” — allowing the investigators to find the communication with Saifullah. In the document, a copy of which was seen by the Guardian, the police say that they found the extremist literature and maps on Dec. 26.
Defense lawyer Hasan Dastagir alleges that police misrepresented the date of the men’s arrest in order to allow for inconsistencies in the evidence.
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