"Newburgh Four": After 15 yrs served, a NY judge orders release of last of four men convicted in 2010 in US terror sting - chastising FBI for inventing the conspiracy and entrapping the targets. Sketchy informant Hussain owned limousine company that killed 20 people in 2018. Is now in prison himself.
"James Cromitie was convicted in 2010 afterFBI invented a conspiracy to attack synagogues and military planes
"Critics have accused federal agents ofentrapping a group of men who were down on their luck after doing prison time.
"In ascathing ruling, McMahon wrote that theFBI had invented the conspiracy and identified the targets.
Cromitie and his co-defendants, she wrote, “would not have, and could not have, devised on their own” a criminal plot involving missiles.
Cromitie was bought into thephony plot by the federal informant Shaheed Hussain, whose work has been criticized for years by civil liberties groups.
McMahon called him“most unsavory” and a “villain” sent by the government to “troll among the poorest and weakest of men for ‘terrorists’who might prove susceptible to an offer of much-needed cash in exchange for committing a faux crime”.
Hussain also worked with the FBI on a sting that targeted an Albany, New York, pizza shop owner and an imamthat involved a loan using money from a fictitious missile sale. Both men, who said they were tricked, were convicted of money laundering and conspiring to aid a terrorist group.
Hussain re-entered the public eye in 2018 when a stretch limousine crashed in rural Schoharie, New York, killing 20 people. Hussain owned the limousine company, operated by his son, Nauman Hussain.
Nauman Hussain was convicted of manslaughter last year and is serving five to 15 years in prison.
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In the Newburgh Four caseset up by the FBI and Hussain, the four men from the small river city 60 miles north of New York City were convicted of terrorism charges in 2010.
Cromitie has served 15 years of his 25-year minimum sentence. The New York-based judge ordered Cromitie’s sentence to be reduced to time served plus 90 days.
Prosecutors in the high-profile case said the Newburgh defendants had spent months scouting targets and securing what they thought were explosives and a surface-to-air missile, aiming to shoot down planes at the air national guard base in Newburgh and blow up synagogues in the Bronx. They were arrested afterallegedly planting “bombs” that were packed with inert explosives supplied by the FBI.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/jan/20/newburgh-four-james-cromitie-ordered-released