With a crowd of his supporters inside federal court, Tarek Mehanna’s lawyers asked a judge to free the Sudbury man until his trial on terrorism-related charges in October, saying he has been held in solitary confinement for more than a year while his case is pending.
The request, unique in that it occurred more than a year after Mehanna was ordered held, was based in large part on his lawyers’ wanting to have him help look over thousands of legal documents, many of them in Arabic. With the restrictions of his solitary confinement, he has had difficulty getting access to the documents, his lawyers said in court records and in open court in Boston yesterday.
The request was also a challenge to federal prosecutors’ description of Mehanna as a dangerous terrorism sympathizer who associated with members of Al Qaeda.
In arguing that he was not a danger and that he would not flee before trial, Mehanna’s lawyers said many of the allegations against their client date back to 2006, yet prosecutors never sought to have him detained before his arrest. In that time, they were trying to turn him into an informant, attorney Janice Bassil said.
“For a man who was so dangerous he should not remain in the community, they did nothing,’’ Bassil said. Also, she argued, US prosecutors took messages Mehanna had written out of context to try to paint him as a terrorist supporter.
The messages “show that as a twentysomething college student, Tarek sometimes made comments that could be considered crude, insensitive, and careless,’’ Bassil said in court records. “The instant messages, however, do not give the slightest hint that Tarek intended or planned harm to anyone.’’
Federal prosecutors argued that it took time to build the case against Mehanna and that the case does not rely solely on the instant messages. Also, the prosecutors said, Mehanna would have more of a motive to flee now because he realizes the seriousness of the charges and the potentially lengthy prison sentence he faces if convicted.
Mehanna had known he faced criminal charges for several years, prosecutors said. He was arrested in November 2008 as he was about to board a plane to start a career as a pharmacist in Saudi Arabia.
“The reason for that was he knew it was too dangerous to stay in the United States because he’s going to have to confront those charges,’’ Assistant US Attorney Aloke Chakravarty said. Mehanna was indicted on more charges last year and was then ordered held without bail.
US District Court Judge George A. O’Toole Jr. took the matter under advisement. The judge was also asked to decide on several defense lawyers’ requests to have the government better outline the charges and accusations against....
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