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Man charged in mass shooting plot at Milwaukee Masonic center seeks release
jsonline.com
Sixteen months after the FBI announced it had thwarted a planned mass shooting in downtown Milwaukee, lawyers for the man charged in the plot say he adamantly refused to participate when pressed by informants they say had been goading their client for months.
The claim comes in a new court motion that Samy Mohamed Hamzeh, 25, should be released on bail pending his trial, now set for February.
The motion reveals new details about the defense's claim of entrapment, gleaned from hours of now-translated Arabic conversations the informants recorded.
The request for Hamzeh's release says he is a U.S. citizen with no criminal record, a solid work history and a job waiting for him, and a family who supports him. They argue Hamzeh should be released on GPS monitoring and give up his passport.
While the news of Hamzeh's arrest in early 2016 carried overtones of terrorism — federal prosecutors said he was planning to kill at least 30 people to "defend Islam" — the resulting charges were two counts of possessing a machine gun and one count of possessing a silencer, all of which he bought for $570 from undercover FBI agents. Each count carries up to 10 years in prison.
Hamzeh's attorneys, federal public defenders Craig Albee and Joseph Bugni, note that the criminal complaint against their client fails to mention that despite the hours of recorded Arabic conversations with the informants, he ultimately "rejected their overtures and lectured his informant friends about why such a plan would be wrong."
The new court filings identify the informants only as Steve, who first met with FBI agents in September 2015 and later indicated he "no longer had papers allowing him to work" in the U.S, and Mike, "a seasoned informant," introduced to Hamzeh later. The defense expects to learn about the informants' motivations from required government disclosures closer to trial.
'Case for entrapment'
The attorneys' request for a bail hearing took so long because they had to have "several hundred hours" of the recorded talks translated into English and transcribed. Those transcripts, the defense filings say, "reveal that at trial Hamzeh has a strong case for entrapment."
The motion says the complaint also doesn't describe everything that led up to Hamzeh briefly possessing the machine guns and silencer in January 2016, when he was arrested. The informants, the motion states, "frequently lobbied Hamzeh to get a machine gun despite his repeated protests that all he wanted was a legal handgun to protect himself."
The alleged plot had an unusual target, the Humphrey Scottish Rite Masonic Center...
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