Yassin M. Aref - Trial

Trial

The trial occurred in September and October 2006. Hossain was convicted of all the counts, and Aref was convicted of 10 of the 30 counts, of conspiring to aid a terrorist group and provide support for a weapon of mass destruction, as well as money-laundering and supporting a foreign terrorist organization, Jaish-e-Mohammed, a group in Pakistan that the informant told the men he supported.

Both men filed appeals. The Aref defense attorneys argued on appeal that there was insufficient evidence, and that this was shown by the fact that Aref was acquitted of all the counts based on the most significant of the recorded conversations with the informant-the two conversations underlying the counts on which he was convicted provided him with no new information.

On March 8, 2007, both Aref and Hossain were sentenced to 15 years in prison–half the sentence called for under the Federal Sentencing Guidelines. Aref’s defense counsel filed a lengthy sentencing memorandum which described Aref’s background and the support shown for him in the community. Aref professed innocence before his sentencing, and criticized the government's treatment of Muslims. After sentencing, Aref was taken to the Communications Management Unit (CMU) at the federal prison in Terre Haute, Indiana.

The Times Union ( ) and the Daily Gazette, Albany’s two main daily newspapers, both ran editorials at the time of the sentencing asking for extreme leniency, the Times Union on March 8 and 9 and the Gazette on March 9.

In addition, Times Union columnist Fred LeBrun, who had followed the trial closely, wrote, prior to the sentencing,

“Someday we'll look back on the present national paranoia over terrorism and the excesses done in its name with the same national embarrassment that Americans feel for Sen. Joe McCarthy's communist witch hunts of the 1950s and our appalling treatment of Japanese-Americans during World War II. Someday. But not anytime soon, and certainly not before Yassin M. Aref, the former imam at an Albany mosque, and Mohammed M. Hossain, a pizza shop owner, are sentenced… Looking up from a warm seat somewhere, Senator Joe must be viewing all this with a knowing smile.”

Carl Strock, the columnist for the Gazette, wrote many columns attacking the process as extremely unfair.

The FBI responded by contacting the editorial boards of the Times Union and the Gazette and running an op-ed piece in the Gazette upholding the sting operation as legitimate.