NEW YORK — The New York Police Department had legitimate reasons to put specific mosques and Muslim worshippers under surveillance as part of its counterterrorism efforts, a city lawyer said Thursday at the first court date in a civil rights lawsuit accusing the NYPD of religious profiling. Peter Farrell of the city Law Department argued…
A Bangladeshi man who tried to blow up the Federal Reserve Bank in New York with what he thought was a 1,000-pound bomb, only to discover that the bomb was a fake and that he had been under constant federal surveillance, was sentenced to 30 years in prison on Friday. The man, Quazi Mohammad Rezwanul Ahsan…
Christine C. Quinn, the City Council speaker and one of the leading Democratic candidates for mayor, walked into a clubhouse in Dyker Heights, Brooklyn, just as people had started to eat and was escorted straight to the buffet. “I’d like to say I planned it,” Ms. Quinn joked. She grabbed a plate, sat…
The revelation in 2011 that the New York City Police Department was spying on law-abiding Muslims rightly attracted scrutiny from the Justice Department, which announced last year that it intended to review the program. The disclosure also raised troubling questions about whether the city was violating a federal court order that bars it from retaining…
NEW YORK (AP) — The New York Police Department’s widespread spying programs directed at Muslims have undermined free worship by innocent people and should be declared unconstitutional, religious leaders and civil rights advocates said Tuesday after the filing of a federal lawsuit. “Our mosque should be an open, religious, a spiritual sanctuary, but NYPD spying…
