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Sentence tossed in millennium bomb case
A court throws out one charge against the convicted plotter.
By Associated PRess
Published January 17, 2007
SAN FRANCISCO - A federal appeals court on Tuesday threw out the sentence of a man who was convicted of plotting to bomb Los Angeles International Airport at the turn of the millennium. Ahmed Ressam was arrested in December 1999 after customs agents found 124 pounds of explosives in the trunk of his car as he disembarked from a ferry in Port Angeles, Wash. Ressam was sentenced to 22 years in prison after being convicted of nine charges. On Tuesday, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco reversed his conviction on one charge and sent the case back to a lower court to issue a new sentence and explain the rationale behind the 22-year term. The decision does not necessarily mean Ressam will get a shorter term. Two of the three appellate judges said Ressam was improperly convicted of carrying an explosive while committing a felony: lying on a customs form. The government failed to show the "explosives somehow aided or emboldened" him to provide a false name at the border, Judge Pamela Rymer wrote. No new sentencing date was immediately set. Between his conviction in 2001 and early 2003, Ressam provided "startlingly helpful" information to authorities, according to U.S. District Judge John Coughenour of Seattle, who sentenced him.
[Last modified January 17, 2007, 01:27:49]
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