ALBANY – Prosecutors are dropping a key claim against one of the men arrested here on terrorism-related charges, saying it was based on a questionable translation of an address book found in Iraq.

Prosecutors initially said the address book, which was retrieved in June 2003 from an alleged terror base near the Syrian border, referred to the defendant, Yassin Aref, as “commander” in Arabic.

Based on a new translation by the FBI rather than the Defense Department, they now say the word was actually Kurdish and means “brother.”

U.S. Attorney Glenn Suddaby acknowledged the discrepancy in a letter Monday to U.S. Magistrate Judge David Homer, who had cited the address book evidence last week when he ordered Mr. Aref and his co-defendant, Mohammed Hossain, held without bail.

Yesterday, at the request of defense attorneys, Judge Homer agreed to reconsider his bail decision at a hearing next Tuesday.

Mr. Suddaby said yesterday the apparent error – first reported by the Albany Times Union – does not bear directly on the criminal charges against Messrs. Aref and Hossain, who stand accused of laundering money as part of what they believed was a plot to assassinate a Pakistani diplomat at the United Nations. The “plot” was an FBI sting operation.

“It doesn’t change a thing,” Mr. Suddaby said in a telephone interview from Syracuse. “The thing that’s important here is the behavior of the defendants…doing what they thought was laundering money for terrorists in New York City….Those are the facts, and we have them locked in.”

Defense attorneys insisted the garbled translation undermines the entire case against their clients.

“This case smelled like a rat from the start, and it is beginning to look more and more like a two-bit frame-up to me,” said the lawyer for Mr. Aref, Terence Kindlon. “It sounded so sinister the way it was presented in court, and you just change this word and it’s totally innocuous.”

The information from the address book “was used before the grand jury; it was used for search warrants; it was used in two press conferences by the government,” said the attorney for Mr. Hossain, Kevin Luibrand. “Now it’s been found to be false and discredited.”

Mr. Hossain is a 49-year-old immigrant from Bangladesh, now a naturalized citizen of the United States, who owns a pizza shop less than a mile from the state Capitol. Mr. Aref is a 39-yearold refugee from Iraqi Kurdistan and the imam of a storefront mosque in the same neighborhood.

The men, arrested on August 5, face 19 counts of money-laundering and conspiracy to support a terrorist plot. If convicted, each man faces up to 21 years and 10 months in prison.

Prosecutors say Mr. Hossain helped an FBI informant, who described himself as an arms dealer, launder $50,000 in cash that the informant described as proceeds from selling a shoulder-launched surface-to-air missile. Mr. Hossain recruited Mr. Aref to witness the transactions, many of which were caught by investigators on audio- and videotape.

Defense attorneys have accused the FBI of entrapment in the case. They say their clients are peaceful family men, with no connection to terrorism, who were targeted by the FBI because of their ethnicity.

Prosecutors deny entrapping or targeting the men, saying it was Mr. Hossain who first approached their informant, looking for help obtaining a false driver’s license for his brother.

Officials at the FBI office in Albany and the Defense Department in Washington declined to comment on their involvement in the case.

In their letter to Judge Homer, prosecutors included copies of both the original address book page and a Defense Department teletype describing it. The original page includes Mr. Aref’s name and old Albany address in handwritten English, along with other writing now identified as Kurdish.

The teletype says the page was “captured by U.S. forces from a Rawah terrorist camp in the western Iraqi desert near the Syrian border on 12 June 2003.”

The teletype said items found at the site included various weapons and weapons manuals, in addition to an address book with “numerous hand-written Arabic entries.” It described Mr. Aref’s entry as “of high interest.”

It translated the writing next to Mr. Aref’s address as “long distance” and the words underneath as “Commander Yasin – New York, United States.” When the FBI translated the document in the past week, however, it interpreted “long distance” as “important,” and “commander” as “brother.”

Mr. Kindlon said the error illustrates why it is dangerous to let law enforcement use evidence gathered by military and intelligence agencies.

“This information for legal purposes turns out to be garbage, absolute garbage,” he said. “And right now there is a man sitting in a cell, isolated from his wife and his children, because a U.S. attorney walked into a courtroom and ardently claimed to have this damaging information.”

Judge Homer had ordered prosecutors to produce the address book evidence during last week’s bail hearing, after Mr. Kindlon challenged its authenticity.