Associated Press
NEW YORK: Recent complaints by a discontented paid police informant to Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton should have no impact on a subway bomb-plot case, federal prosecutors argue in court papers.
A letter sent to Clinton last month by Egyptian-born Osama El Dawoody in which he complains about his treatment contains no new information or newly discovered evidence about the investigation of a 2004 scheme to blow up a busy subway station in Manhattan, prosecutors say in the papers, dated Sept. 15 and made public Monday.
A defense attorney had claimed the letter, in which El Dawoody complained that the government had gone back on promises to reward him for his dangerous undercover work, could be used to argue for a new trial for would-be bomber Shahawar Matin Siraj. A call to the attorney on Monday was not immediately returned.
It was unclear when a judge would rule on the matter.
El Dawoody told The Associated Press earlier this month that his attempt to seek help from Clinton had angered authorities, who cautioned him not to contact her again. He also showed the AP a written response from the senator saying she had requested a review of this matter, though her office said she was not personally involved in the exchange.
In El Dawoody s handwritten letter, he described going undercover after a New York Police Department detective promised me the greatest life financially and protection for his family. But once investigators arrested Siraj, he added, all the promises were gone. Prosecutors said they had notified the defense before Siraj s trial that El Dawoody was being paid by the FBI and NYPD, and that they still planned to help him get a job and relocate.
They dismissed as irrelevant the fact that Mr. El Dawoody is currently concerned about his safety and well-being and wondering whether the government will honor its previously disclosed promises.
The NYPD recruited Eldawoody, 50, a naturalized U.S. citizen, to monitor radical Muslims at mosques and elsewhere following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
He testified that he met Siraj at an Islamic bookstore and secretly recorded conversations over the next several months as his anti-American rants evolved into a plot to bomb the Herald Square subway station.
Siraj was convicted in May in a case NYPD officials have touted as a success story for their heightened counterterrorism effort.
