Man Accused in Terror Plot Wants Out of Solitary
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
Federal prosecutors say a jazz bassist accused of being involved in a terror plot must be kept in solitary confinement because he could attempt to recruit other inmates for jihad if transferred into the general inmate population.
Tarik Shah has been held in isolation in the Special Housing Unit at the Metropolitan Correction Center in Lower Manhattan since his arrest in May 2005. Mr. Shah has written several letters to prison officials asking to be transferred. He said he is confined to his cell 23 hours a day and that the severe, lonely terms of his pre-trial detention expose him to “potential psychological damage.”
Prosecutors responded to Mr. Shah’s request in a letter last week to the judge, Loretta Preska, of U.S. District Court in Manhattan. Mr. Shah is alleged to have sworn fealty to Osama bin Laden in the presence of a federal agent posing as an Al Qaeda recruiter. A prosecutor in the case, Jennifer Rodgers, wrote that Mr. Shah, a jujitsu expert and jazz musician, intended “to help train Al Qaeda operatives for hand-to-hand combat, and in the use of weapons including swords and machetes.”
In her letter, Ms. Rodgers asks Judge Preska to keep Mr. Shah in solitary confinement. She states that he presents a physical danger to other inmates and suggest that he might try to recruit other inmates.
“Clearly an individual with the physical prowess and training of Shah … would pose a significant risk to both other inmates and prison officials if Shah were permitted to mix freely with (and potentially recruit) other inmates,” Ms. Rodgers wrote to Judge Loretta Preska in a letter late last week.
The decision to keep Mr. Shah in the SHU was made by the Bureau of Prisons, which has reviewed Mr. Shah’s status on 15 occasions, a lawyer for the bureau, Adam Johnson, wrote to the court on Friday.
Mr. Shah has not been satisfied with the prison’s review procedures. In a letter dated November 16, 2005, Mr. Shah wrote: “I am an American with well over ten generations of family who were also American, so why is it that I cannot get a meaningful and impartial review of my status?” The letter was added to the court file last week.
