Image: National Center for Missing and Exploited Children/CNN
On either 30 November or 1 December 2017, while Ramzi was in the shower, he announced that he was taking the boy to the park. On 3 August 2018, the Taos County Sheriff’s Office obtained a warrant to search the compound.
One of the children later told officers that the boy’s body was in the tunnel. The court upheld the refusal to suppress evidence seized from the compound, reasoning that the defendants were more like trespassers than tenants on land owned by Jason and Tanya Badger, who had told them to leave. That belief rested on messages that a companion, Jany Leveille, claimed to receive from God. Siraj also believed the only remedy was ruqyah, which the opinion describes as a Muslim version of an exorcism. He did not return, and he left the child’s medication behind. A Georgia juvenile court later issued a pick-up order authorising police to retrieve the boy and place him with his mother, but by then he was already in New Mexico. Officers arrested Siraj and Lucas and removed the others. The jury convicted Siraj on three counts, which were, conspiracy to provide material support to kill federal officers, providing that support, and conspiracy to kill federal officers. It convicted Lucas on those counts and on both kidnapping counts, while acquitting Hujrah and Subhanah of the material support charges. The trial court sentenced all four defendants to life imprisonment. Not every argument succeeded. Officers seized firearms, ammunition and a bulletproof vest during the search. The panel also rejected Siraj’s request for a separate trial and treated a challenge to the indictment as waived.
Leveille, a fifth defendant, had earlier pleaded guilty to conspiring to provide material support to kill federal officers and to a firearms charge.
Because they did not require proof that the intended victims were identified specifically enough to be federal officers, on the conspiracy-to-kill charge, the court agreed the jury instructions were wrong. It found no reasonable probability of a different outcome, however. It also held that evidence of a plan to attack federal institutions after the boy’s expected resurrection, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Central Intelligence Agency, was enough to support the charge. A theory about killing any officers who approached the compound was not enough.
A federal appeals court has overturned kidnapping convictions in the New Mexico compound case that began when a father took his disabled three-year-old son from Georgia. The court held that the jury was misdirected on what makes a kidnapping unlawful, and that the evidence could not show unlawful conduct by the father’s relatives while he held lawful parental rights. Two defendants who represented themselves at trial also had their convictions on separate charges vacated after being wrongly excluded from a key jury discussion. The case centres on the death of Abdul Ghani at a remote desert compound in New Mexico.