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Home Front
Dead co-conspirators tell no tales, do they?
2002-02-14
  • The death of a driver's license examiner at the center of a federal fraud investigation was not an accident. Federal and state investigators found gasoline on the clothes Katherine Smith was wearing when she died Sunday in a car crash on a stretch of U.S. 72 in Tennessee. Investigators also found evidence of some kind of accelerant in the burned-out interior of Smith's car.

    Smith's death came during a probable cause and bond hearing for three of her five co-defendants in an alleged scheme to get Tennessee driver's licenses using false information for men with Middle Eastern ties who lived in New York City. Mohammed Fares, Mostafa Said Abou-Shahin and Abdelmuhsen Mahmid Hammad were ordered held without bond. Smith and her co-defendants, including alleged ring leader Khaled Odtllah and Hammad's cousin, Sakhera Hammad, were charged Feb. 6 with conspiracy to fraudulently obtain Tennessee driver's licenses. While her five co-defendants have been imprisoned without bond since their Feb. 5 arrest, Smith was released on her own recognizance. She died one day before she was due to appear at a detention hearing before a federal magistrate judge.
    Cheap, disposable, and easily replaced. But they're only being held without bail because they're Arabs, according to their mouthpiece lawyer.
    • Posted by:Fred Pruitt

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