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Hussain's federal legal problems began after the 9/11 terrorist attacks when he was arrested in an FBI fraud investigation that targeted a ring of corrupt translators, state motor vehicle workers and nearly 100 immigrants who had illegally obtained driver's licenses with help from Hussain.
At the time, Hussain owned and operated a Getty gas station on South Pearl Street in Albany. He also worked as a translator for the state Department of Motor Vehicles, and had routinely accepted bribes of several hundred dollars each to help immigrants, who in some cases couldn't drive well, pass written exams they couldn't understand, according to court records.
Following his arrest in December 2001, and while facing the prospect of a long prison term and eventual deportation to his native Pakistan, Hussain agreed to become an informant for the FBI.
Hussain had emigrated to the U.S. in 1993 and still held a green card at the time he went to work for the FBI, which credited him with helping arrest more than a dozen people, including the people involved in the DMV scandal and a member of an Afghani-based heroin trafficking ring.
But it was Hussain's work as an informant in a controversial counter-terrorism sting in Albany that thrust him into the spotlight. He worked in an undercover role, posing as an arms dealer, to help federal authorities snare two immigrants with no criminal backgrounds at the time: Yassin Aref, an Iraqi refugee and imam of a Central Avenue mosque, and Mohammed Hussain, a Bangladeshi immigrant who owned a pizza shop.
Aref and Mohammed Hussain were both arrested in 2004 and accused of laundering money in connection with a fictitious terror plot set up by the FBI's informant.
They were convicted in 2006 and both sentenced to 15 years in federal prison. Aref was recently released from prison and is being held in custody pending his deportation to Iraq.
In May 2009, Hussain the informant resurfaced as an FBI informant when four men from Newburgh were charged with conspiring to plant explosives outside the Riverdale Jewish Center and Riverdale Temple in New York City. As in the Albany case, Shahed Hussain posed as a wealthy businessman and befriended the men before implicating them in a terror plot.
The four Newburgh men, Laguerre Payen, James Cromitie, Onta Williams and David Williams, were convicted but the FBI's use of Shahed Hussain drew harsh criticism and raised entrapment questions.
Three years later, in 2012, Hussain again took part in an undercover FBI sting, this time targeting a then-34-year-old man, Khalifah Al-Akili, who lived near Pittsburgh. Khalifah Al-Akili told the Times Union in an interview that year that the FBI had used in an apparent attempt to test Al-Akili's interest in jihad and anti-American views.
Al-Akili, who was later convicted of a firearms charge, said he was approached by Hussain, who went by the name "Mohammed," and another man, who used the name "Shareef," when they turned up in his neighborhood and repeatedly made attempts to get close to Al-Akili. But Al-Akili said he quickly figured out Hussain's identity as an FBI informant. He said the men were "too obvious" and requested receipts even for small items they purchased like coffee and donuts.
In addition, he said, a cell phone number Hussain had given him was the same number used by Hussain during the 2009 counterterrorism investigation against the four Newburgh men. Al-Akili said he found the number and its connection to that case through a simple Internet search using Google.
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