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"The failure to win any convictions against the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development was the third major setback for federal prosecutors after charging individuals in this country with providing aid to foreign terrorists.
- In 2005, former college professor Sami Al-Arian was acquitted on eight counts of aiding the Palestinian Islamic Jihad. After a six-month trial, jurors deadlocked on nine other counts. Al-Arian pleaded guilty to one count of providing services to members of the terrorist group rather than face a retrial. He was sentenced last year to four years and nine months in prison and will be deported after serving the sentence.
- This year, a jury in Illinois acquitted Muhammad Salah and Abdelhaleem Ashqar of operating a terrorist recruiting and financing cell. Salah was sentenced in July to 21 months in federal prison for lying in a civil lawsuit. The lawsuit was filed by parents of an American teenager murdered in Israel by Hamas gunmen — Holy Land was a defendant.
- On Monday, a federal court jury in Dallas failed to reach a verdict after a two-month trial in which Holy Land was accused of aiding the Palestinian militant group Hamas. The judge declared a mistrial, and the lead prosecutor said he expected the government to retry the case. One of five defendants was acquitted on 31 of 32 counts against him but could be retried on that single count."
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/ap/tx/5235568.html<
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"The case presented to a Texas jury of eight women and four men relied heavily on Israeli intelligence and involved disputed documents and electronic surveillance gathered by federal agents over a span of nearly 15 years. Fish's order ended a two-month trial and 19 days of jury deliberations over allegations that Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development and five of its former leaders provided financial aid to the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas.
President Bush announced in December 2001 that the Texas-based charity's assets were being seized, and in a Rose Garden news conference accused the organization of financing terrorism. Monday's outcome, however, raised serious questions about those allegations as well.
"I think it is a huge defeat for the government," said David Cole, a Georgetown University law professor specializing in 1st Amendment cases and terrorism prosecutions.
"They spent almost 15 years investigating this group, seized all their records and had extensive wiretapping and yet could not obtain a single conviction on charges of supporting a terrorist organization."
According to one juror interviewed Monday afternoon, the panel was evenly split on most of the disputed charges and not close to convicting anyone.
Juror William Neal, 33, who said his father worked in military intelligence, said that the government's case had "so many gaps" that he regarded the prosecution as "a waste of time."
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-holyland23oct23,1,1922726.story?coll=la-headlines-nation&ctrack=1&cset=true