Pak-American prosecutor takes down terrorists far and wide

NEW YORK: Zainab Ahmad is one of America’s top counterterrorism prosecutors, specialising in extra-territorial cases, trying bad characters not present in the United States or gathering evidence related to crimes committed in far off lands to present before juries here.

Ahmad, 37, was born in New York to immigrant parents from Pakistan, that international slouch on counterterrorism that could not have done more to sully its record on the issue.

It was her dogged pursuit over years and across time-zones that forced Alhassane Ould Mohamed, a Malian also known as Cheibani, to plead guilty in 2016 to murdering an American diplomat in Niger in 2000. She had 18 witnesses flown in to the US from Niger and Mali.

In November 2015, a New York jury agreed with Ahmad to convict a Pakistani man, Abid Naseer, who had been arrested in a connection with an al-Qaeda plot in Britain.

“We were a bit desperate before Zainab showed up here,” a British police officer told The New Yorker. “When Zainab walked in the room, we said, ‘Crikey, she looks awfully young. Is this a junior sent here to fact-find?’

“Within a few minutes, though, it was, like, ‘Whoa, she knows what she’s doing.’ There was no comparison with UK prosecutors. Zainab stayed four days with us on that first visit, and left us a big list of evidence she wanted, and exactly how she wanted it packaged up.”

 
Abdul Kadir and Russell Defreitas are seen in a courtroom sketch on trial in Brooklyn, N.Y. They are accuesd of a plot to attack John F. Kennedy International Airport in 2007.