(CN) - With their first court battle hours away Thursday, Muslims opposing police surveillance of their communities decried the "inflammatory insinuation and innuendo" in a recent letter from New York City on their supposed terrorism ties.
The group, which includes imams, mosques and Muslim charities represented by the American Civil Liberties Union, had sued New York City, Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Police Commissioner Ray Kelly and Deputy Commissioner of Intelligence David Cohen in June.
They said the NYPD had infiltrated their communities without reasonable suspicion.
Though it denied every allegation of the 164-paragraph complaint, the city acknowledged that the NYPD kept tabs on each of the plaintiffs, installed a surveillance camera near one of the mosques, and sent a confidential informant into their meetings and services.
That informant, Shamiur Rahman, outed himself to his targets on Facebook before publicly renouncing his police employment. He told the Associated Press that the NYPD paid him to "bait" Muslims into making incriminating remarks.
City lawyers defended the NYPD's tactics as serving a "legitimate government interest of investigating and deterring potential unlawful activity, not any kind of unlawful religious profiling," in a six-page letter Tuesday.
The letter takes aim at one of the plaintiff mosques, Masjid At-Taqwa, for its "lengthy history of suspected criminal activity, some of it terroristic in nature."
City lawyers also claimed that the police have "information" that the security team for the mosque and "certain attendees" have illegally trafficked weapons there.
"Blind Sheikh" Omar Abdel Rahman, who is serving a life sentence for his role in a plot to bomb New York City landmarks in the mid-1990s, lectured at the mosque, and its current imam, nonparty Siraj Wahhaj, was named as an "unindicted co-conspirator" in the same conspiracy, the letter states.
Since an "unindicted co-conspirator" is not charged with a crime, he cannot contest the allegations against him. Prosecutors designate people and organizations with this label to gain admission of evidence that might otherwise be dismissed as hearsay.
Muslim groups like the Council on American-Islamic Relations have tried to fight such a designation in a case against the Holy Land Foundation, which a federal jury in Texas convicted of giving money to Hamas.
A recent investigation by the Association Press revealed that the NYPD initiated a "terroristic enterprise investigation," or TEI, against other mosques including plaintiff Masjid Al-Ansar.
The tag made any worshipper "fair game for surveillance," the article revealed.
Its authors Matt Apuzzo and Adam Goldman, who recently wrote the book "Enemies Within: Inside the NYPD's Secret Spying Unit and bin Laden's Final Plot Against America," reported that the TEI designation is so potentially invasive that the FBI would not touch it.
Al-Ansar co-founder Abdel Hameed Shehadeh was found guilty of lying to federal agents about his plan to travel to Pakistan to fight U.S. forces on behalf of the Taliban or al-Qaida, the city's letter states. The NYPD says that convicted subway bomb plotters Najibullah Zazi, Zarein Ahmedzay and Adis Medunjanin, and others convicted of terrorism crimes, had attended lectures at Al-Ansar.
The letter makes no allegation against Al-Ansar imam Hassan Raza, another of the plaintiffs, except to list him among its more notorious visitors, lecturers or members.
