A Sacramento man is accused of being a terrorist. New evidence could cast doubt on the case
It was a headline few could forget: A leader of the Islamic State group found in Sacramento. The Iraqi government wanted Omar Ameen arrested and extradited immediately to face trial for murder. That push for hurried extradition, though, turned into a two-year fight by a defense team who say that's not the story at all.
On the morning of Aug. 15, 2018, agents with the FBI, Sacramento sheriff's deputies and Sacramento Metro Fire converged on an apartment off of Eastern Avenue in Sacramento County. They were all part of the Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF) and looking for Ameen, an auto mechanic and Iraqi refugee. The government says he is a terrorist and a murderer.
"Certainly the allegations were really dramatic," says Rachelle Barbour with the federal defender's office, public defenders for the federal courts. "You read what the government came out of the gate with and it was overwhelming. It made it seem like they just had the case locked up tight and there was nothing to do."
Defense attorneys for Omar Ameen say they have evidence to cast doubt on his case
This case is unlike anything Barbour's office has dealt with before. "We do all kinds of cases that come in," Barbour says, adding that "federal cases tend to be drug cases, fraud, immigration, and computer-related cases. You know if they're drug cases they're probably pretty big cases."
But few cases reach the level of Omar Ameen's.
"Working on Omar's case a lot — that's a big part of my caseload," Barbour says.
After Ameen was arrested, Barbour and her office had to handle a case with international attention. Initially, the story being told was the government's narrative, laid out in the extradition paperwork.
In June of 2014, fighters with the Islamic State seized control of the Rawah District of the Al-Anbar Province in Iraq. By this time, 70% of the province was controlled by ISIS. An Iraqi paid informant says that at 7 p.m. on June 22, a convoy of ISIS vehicles drove into Rawah to the home of police officer Ihsan Jhasim. After a firefight at the Jhasim home, the officer was shot. He was taken to the hospital where he later died.
All of that is undisputed.
What is disputed is exactly who pulled the trigger. That paid informant claims Ameen was leading the attack.
"And then we talk to Omar," says defense attorney Barbour, "and when you talk to someone and you say you know here's what they're saying about, and the reaction is complete and total shock, it really makes you think."
KCRA 3 Investigates wanted to hear what happened in Omar Ameen's own words, but because of the case pending against him, and because he contracted COVID-19 in the Sacramento County Jail, he is in solitary confinement. Yet KCRA 3 Investigates was able to trade letters with the help of Ameen's translator.
According to his translator, Ameen spent hours writing out the responses to our questions, saying: "I met my defense attorneys who told me the details of the case, I realized that the case had been fabricated and all the events in it were lies on top of lies. I left Iraq in 2012 and stayed in Turkey, in Mersin...I never left Turkey."
Specifically, in 2012, Ameen moved to Mersin, Turkey, a resort town far removed from the violence in Iraq's Al-Anbar province. Ameen applied for refugee status, but eventually, the refugee agency decided to place him in the United States.
Getting into the U.S. as a refugee takes a long time and it takes a lot of vetting. Yet by November of 2014, just five months after the death of Ihsan Jasim, U.S. refugee agencies had cleared Omar Ameen and he was living in Salt Lake City, Utah.
"I have always felt I belonged to this country more than my home country," Ameen tells KCRA in his letter. "I never felt I was in a strange place. My own friends and relatives turned their backs on me, but the kind people of this country stood by me and my family."
Ameen took pictures of his new country, posing in front of trees on his first Christmas in America. By 2016, he had moved to Sacramento and was working as an auto mechanic. He took his kids to the mountains and went sledding with them. Then came that day in August of 2018 when the FBI knocked on his door.
"That day will always be with me, disturbing me and torturing me," Ameen says. "I got up out of bed and the whole apartment was shaking from the intensity of the knocking on the door. I opened the door to find an FBI agent carrying weapons saying there was an arrest warrant for me from the Iraqi government for killing a police officer."
Ameen was booked into the Sacramento County Jail. He faced a judge that same week and the U.S. attorney argued that he should be extradited immediately. Their argument: this is an Iraqi case, not one for the U.S. courts.
Yet Ameen insisted he was in Turkey when the killing happened. His defense attorneys wanted a chance to prove it.
Judge Edmund Brennan said looking into evidence that might prove Ameen's whereabouts was worth it because of the stakes involved. In Omar Ameen's own words, if he went back to Iraq, "I'm afraid of being tortured more than I fear death. There are no human rights there, or oversight of any kind. Their methods of torture are horrible. They hang prisoners from their hands while they're tied to their back until their shoulders are dislocated. There's rape and there are threats to family members. Most prisoners die of torture even though they might be innocent, and no one can hold the interrogators there accountable."
While Ameen could not travel to the Middle East to prove his innocence, Rachelle Barbour could.
"I went to Turkey and elsewhere in Europe because there were witnesses that we needed to talk to when Omar was there in 2014," Barbour says. Her goal was to retrace Ameen's steps and habits. "Thankfully, he was a registered refugee. So there was a lot of oversight and it was a matter of figuring out what that oversight was, what agencies might have information about him, and then each one there was a slightly different path to actually being able to get that information to show that he was in Turkey."
Barbour had another idea, too, to use the same kinds of evidence prosecutors had been using for years to convict her clients: cell phone records. She would use cell phone records and data from cell towers to show where Omar Ameen was on June 22, 2014.
It took two years wrangling with prosecutors, the State Department, and the Turkish government and telecommunications companies, but she got the records.
The data shows Ameen's phone in use in Turkey for the entire summer of 2014.
"Even more critically, he was on the phone at 8:30 at night in Mersin at his house in Turkey," says Barbour. "So that shows that within you know half an hour, maybe an hour of the murder in Iraq that he's charged with, he was actually in Turkey on the phone."
The U.S. government says it's possible anyone could have had Ameen's phone, but Barbour dismisses that argument. Ameen's habits for the weeks prior to the murder, and after, are consistent with the usage on that day. "Looking at the evidence it doesn't seem possible. I mean you know if we're going to sort of engage in a sort of fantasy, I mean I guess he could have jet-packed over to Iraq or something."
Mersin is more than 600 miles away from Rawah, Iraq.
KCRA 3 Investigates reached out to the U.S. attorney's office for comment but they would not comment beyond what has been filed in court. The U.S. did file a response to Barbour's evidence citing, again, multiple eyewitnesses. They claim that the phone records show that Ameen dialed the number of a known terrorist, though the government does not say that person's name. They say the records, again, do not prove that Ameen was the one holding the phone.
"I think the only possible theory the government could have at this point is that Omar hired a body double to go you know live his life," says Barbour. "I mean really comes down to live his life, come home, sleep in his house, be with his wife and kids so that he could do what? Go kill someone he doesn't have a beef with for an organization he has nothing to do with?" She adds that the Islamic State group using Ameen to commit a murder makes no sense, saying IS wasn't short of people to do that sort of thing.
But beyond all that, the U.S. attorney argues that the U.S. courts should not even be hearing evidence. They say it's an Iraqi case and Iraq should handle it.
Now, after a lengthy, nearly three-year battle, Barbour says she believes that the phone records are "obliterating evidence" that Ameen was not in Iraq and he should not be extradited. So far, U.S. officials disagree, maintaining that, even with the evidence, Ameen should be sent back to Iraq to face the murder charges.
For Rachelle Barbour, the heavy responsibility of Ameen's life or death situation keeps her going, to make sure she did all she could on his behalf.
"If Omar gets returned I can't feel like I left anything back, like I held anything back. I mean, it's — having an innocent client is a weighty, weighty responsibility," she said.
Ameen tells KCRA 3 Investigates that if he's let go he plans to stay in the U.S., saying that the lawyers who represent him show the best of what America has to offer.
"My home country wants to take me back to kill me, and my defense lawyers are holding on to me, trying to save me, fighting for me day and night, and I hope they forgive me for all the trouble and sadness I've caused them. They feel my same feelings of sadness and injustice," says Ameen.
For now, the next step is in Judge Brennan's hands. If he allows the evidence, there will likely be more filings and possibly more hearings. But he could also pave the way for Ameen's release. If he doesn't and certifies the extradition, the next step for the defense would be to ask for a writ of habeas corpus, basically asking the judge to determine if the detention of Omar Ameen is legal or not. If that failed, they could go to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. If that failed, it's an appeal to the U.S. Department of State.
The U.S. filed another response asking the judge to ignore the cellphone data. They add, though, that certifying Ameen for extradition wouldn't necessarily mean he'd be sent back to Iraq. They argue it's then in the hands of the new U.S. Secretary of State, Anthony Blinken. We reached out to his office but they would not comment on the record about the case.