For more than a year, federal defenders in Sacramento have been working to get records out of Turkey that they say will prove their case that Omar Ameen, a Sacramento truck mechanic arrested in August 2018 and accused of murdering an Iraqi police officer in 2014, is innocent.
Now, as Ameen sits in the Sacramento County Jail awaiting word on whether he will be extradited to face trial in Iraq and, possibly, executed, his lawyers have what they’ve been waiting for: cellphones records from Turkey that they say prove he could not have been in Iraq the day police Major Ihsan Abdulhafiz Jasim was slain by an ISIS convoy.
“As anticipated, they completely exonerate Omar Ameen,” federal defenders Ben Galloway and Rachelle Barbour wrote in a filing in Sacramento federal court. “The records show Mr. Ameen was at his home in Mersin, Turkey, on June 22, 2014, the day Mr. Jasim was killed in Rawah, Iraq.
“In fact, the cellphone records show that Mr. Ameen had two phone calls that very day, connecting through the cell tower closest to his home in Mersin. The cellphone records prove that Mr. Ameen was in Mersin during the entirety of June 2014, including in the days before and after Mr. Jasim’s murder.”
Ameen’s lawyers say they received the records Dec. 22 after lengthy efforts to obtain them and over objections by federal prosecutors who contend there are eyewitnesses to the slaying and that Ameen should be sent back to Iraq to face trial there.
“The United States continues to oppose any delay in these extradition proceedings, as the Turkcell records that Omar Ameen seeks to obtain via a letter rogatory are inadmissible contradictory evidence that could not obliterate probable cause,” prosecutors wrote in a filing one day before Ameen’s lawyers say they received the phone records.
At issue is where Ameen was the day of the killing, leading an ISIS convoy into his hometown or Rawah, or 600 miles away in Turkey, where his lawyers contend he was waiting with his family for permission to move to the United States.
Ameen faces no charges in the United States, where he has lived since November 2014, first in Salt Lake City and then in Sacramento’s Arden Arcade neighborhood.
But federal prosecutors have been working on an Iraqi government request that he be extradited to face trial in the slaying there.
A Jan. 29 hearing has been set before U.S. Magistrate Judge Edmund F. Brennan as the next step in the case, and Ameen’s lawyers say the phone records — obtained after Barbour traveled to Turkey and the defense hired an investigator and Turkish lawyer to help — show Ameen had nothing to do with the slaying.
“As the records prove, Mr. Ameen is absolutely innocent of the killing of Mr. Jasim,” they wrote in a court filing.
The case, which began under the Trump administration Justice Department, is not expected to be settled before President-elect Joe Biden is in office, and the Secretary of State has the final say over whether to approve Ameen’s extradition if Brennan determines there is probable cause that Ameen should be sent back.
The case has generated international headlines since Ameen, now 47, was arrested at his Eastern Avenue apartment complex during a raid by federal agents on Aug. 15, 2018.
Court filings described him as a “terrorist,” a member of the Islamic State and the owner of a 2005 Kia Sportage “with a cut-out roof and a PKC machine gun mounted on the rear.”
Iraqi officials contend in court filings that Ameen killed Jasim, a former neighbor and friend, by shooting him in the chest with an automatic rifle while he stood over him.
“You are an agent of America,” one witness claimed to have Ameen. “You are an apostate.”
His lawyers say that is impossible, that he was in Turkey with his wife and three children, checking in regularly with authorities and creating electronic records proving that as he used social media and his cellphone.
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