Former 9/11 detainee files $20 million civil rights suit
From Phil Hirschkorn
CNN
Thursday, December 12, 2002 Posted: 3:55 PM EST (2055 GMT)
NEW YORK (CNN) -- An Egyptian exchange student once accused of lying to
federal investigators and held as a September 11 detainee filed a civil
rights lawsuit Thursday seeking $20 million in damages.
The action by Abdallah Higazy, 31, came less than three weeks after
prosecutors completed a court-ordered investigation that exonerated FBI
agents involved in his case.
Higazy is suing FBI agent Michael Templeton, who administered a disputed
lie detector test that was central to the aborted prosecution. He is one of
the five named defendants in Higazy's complaint filed in Manhattan federal
court.
Templeton "extracted a false confession ... through coercion, threats, and
intimidation," Higazy alleges.
The other defendants are Ronald Ferry, the former hotel security guard who
framed Higazy by claiming to find a pilot's radio in the safe in his room;
the Millennium hotel, across the street from the World Trade Center, where
Higazy stayed on the 51st floor; the hotel's chief of security, Stuart
Yule; and the Hilton Hotels Corporation, which manages the Millennium.
Higazy's problems started when Ferry, a former Newark, New Jersey police
officer, told investigators he found the radio in Higazy's room. The
hand-held radio, known as a transceiver, can be used by pilots for
air-to-air or air-to-ground communication.
Higazy, who began a computer engineering graduate program at Polytechnic
University in Brooklyn just one week before the September 11 hijackings,
had been assigned by the school to live in the hotel until he found
housing. He evacuated the hotel with other guests after the second hijacked
plane slammed into the World Trade Center.
FBI agents detained Higazy as a material witness December 17, 2001, when he
returned to the hotel to retrieve his personal belongings, including his
passport and a Koran.
"I was taken arrested put in solitary, confinement ,shackled, strip
searched," Higazy recalled Thursday.
During the lie detector test 10 days later, Higazy falsely admitted the
radio was his, the basis of the prosecution.
Higazy claims Templeton threatened him during the course of their session,
that he mentioned his brother, living in upstate New York, and said, "we'll
make sure Egyptian security gives your family hell."
According to the government's report, Templeton interpreted Higazy's
denials that he had participated in the September 11 attacks as lies.
Prosecutors charged Higazy with one count of lying to federal agents and
kept him in custody for a month.
Three days after the charges against Higazy were made public, an American
private pilot who was staying in a room one floor below Higazy's claimed
the radio. Prosecutors dropped the charges two days later, and Higazy was
released from custody in mid-January.
Higazy's suit accuses the Millennium Hilton of negligence in its hiring and
training of Ferry and Yule, who passed Ferry's information to the FBI.
Ferry was convicted in March for lying to federal agents and sentenced to
six months worth of weekends in prison.
Higazy is seeking $10 million in compensatory damages and $10 million in
punitive damages.
"There's really no way to calculate the harm that's been done to Mr.
Higazy's reputation internationally," said attorney Robert Dunn. "People
still believe he has something to do with 9/11 and but for some
technicality of some kind or another, he would be in jail. So his character
has been besmirched internationally, his family and he have suffered
extreme emotional distress, so there is really no way you can go to a
calculator and punch up a number."
The attorney added that a Higazy suit against the government, including the
FBI, is "under consideration." There is a two-year statute of limitations
for him to file that.
Over the past year, Higazy has gotten married and resumed his studies at
Brooklyn Polytechnic, commuting from southern New Jersey. But he said he
would like to see a psychiatrist about the experience of being wrongly
accused.
"I have had nightmares. A lot of time I wake up dreaming that the FBI wants
to arrest me," Higazy said.
http://www.cnn.com/2002/LAW/12/12/wtc.pilot.radio.suit/
www.cnn.com/2002/LAW/12/12/wtc.pilot.rad...
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