Washington – Early this year, federal authorities alerted police departments around the United States of the threat posed by people making bulk purchases of prepaid cellphones.
With a burgeoning underground market for the phones, authorities feared they could be used to bankroll terrorists – or as detonators to trigger a series of explosive attacks.
So when five men in Ohio and Michigan were stopped last week in separate incidents and found to be carrying large numbers of the phones, local authorities decided to do their part in fighting the war on terrorism.
The men were arrested and charged under state law with terrorism-related offenses.
But now the local cases against the men appear to be unraveling almost as quickly as they were stitched together.
The FBI has taken the unusual step of declaring publicly that it was unaware of any evidence linking the men to terrorists.
On Tuesday, the prosecutor in the Ohio case dismissed the terror-related charges because he couldn’t prove them.
And defense lawyers in the Michigan case are going to court today to have the charges against their clients thrown out.
The arrests have raised questions about the role of state and local authorities when it comes to prosecuting terrorists – a function that has been the exclusive province of the federal government since the Sept. 11 attacks.
While some of the federal cases have come under attack as targeting people who posed little threat to the country, the Michigan and Ohio cases are believed to be the first in recent memory brought under state law for terrorism-related crimes, and show how states are starting to take matters into their own hands. The Ohio charges were believed to be the first filed under a state anti-terror law enacted in April.
Lawyers and supporters of the men – all of Middle-Eastern descent – said they believed they were arrested because of their ethnicity and that they were only looking to make money by buying and reselling the phones.
