The most terrible car accident in the United States happened due to the informant of the FBI. He avoided responsibility for years - in exchange for what Muslims substituted

On October 6, 2018, the limousine, converted from the Ford Excursion SUV, lost control due to broken brakes at the intersection of two routes in the state of New York. The car at a speed of 190 kilometers per hour rammed the parked Toyota Highlander and shot down two passers -by to death. 16 people in the limousine died instantly from injuries, and two more in the hospital in a few hours. It soon became clear that the company that provided a faulty car is owned by a long -standing informant of the FBI. He repeatedly had problems with the law, but cooperation with special services helped to avoid punishment. Read our retelling of the article in the New York Magazine about how neither the Shahid Hussein nor his family was responsible for this accident - only because for years he helped the FBI to imprison Muslims on charges of participating in fictional terrorist attacks.

A month before the tragedy, the inspector visited with the audit the New York Albani capital, the Prestige Limouses Promotion Agency and recognized the Ford Excursion to be unsuitable for operation. The company was owned by a man named Shahid Khussein. His 28-year-old son, a professional player in paintball, Nauman periodically helped his father-talked with clients, watched the cars and conducted the business of the company. On a fateful night, when an order for a large party entered, it was Hussein Jr. who removed the sticker glued by the inspector from a faulty limousine and called the driver, 53-year-old Scott Lizinikka. He knew about the deplorable state of the car, but obeyed the boss.

At about o’clock in the afternoon, Lizinikkya drove up on a limousine to the house of a 29-year-old factory worker for the production of semiconductors of Axel Steinburg in the town of Amsterdam. He ordered a car for his wife’s birthday and invited most friends and relatives on a festive trip. Among them were three sisters of the birthday, the brother of Axel himself and several more young people - only 17 people. They were going to get to the limousine to the brewery in the village of Kuperstown and have already arranged the main party there. About 80 kilometers separated them from the destination.

Some passengers drew attention to the poor condition of the car even when seedlings. Rusty details, a shabby salon and dull backlight made an oppressive impression. One of the guests wrote to another, who at the last moment could not come: “The limousine sounds as if it will explode now. This is really a collapse. We will all deaf from the motor. ”

Around 13:45, Excursion was about an hour away from the brewery, but due to the bypass route it moved more in the opposite direction. At the highway on the top of the hill, Lizinikkya moved to the side of the road, as if he had noticed a malfunction. The car continued to move forward under the hill, although it burned in the rear. It was this strange picture that was found by the municipal employee of Holly Wood with her daughter passing by. The woman slowed down next to the limousine, but the driver gestured to her in the distance, and Wood went on. After a couple of minutes, Wood, waiting for the traffic light to go to another highway, heard a roar that resembled the engine engine right.

On the road with a steep slope, the overloaded limousine gained maximum speed and flew to the intersection with another highway. Having slipped through it, in the parking lot of the store, he crashed into a parked Toyota at full speed, but even after that he moved at a speed of about 120 kilometers per hour for some time and eventually fell into the ditch. Outside, the passenger compartment looked almost untouched, but inside there was a mess of human bodies. None of the passengers were fastened. 16 of them died on the spot, and two more in a few hours in the hospital. The ambulance paramedics, who arrived at the scene of the accident, later had to undergo a course of psychological rehabilitation from what they saw. In total, 20 people were killed: all passengers, a driver and two random passers -by. By the number of victims, this was the most deadly accident in the United States with the participation of vehicles, including the crashes of aircraft, over the past decade.

Four days later, Nauman Hussein was arrested for causing death by negligence. In the cabin of his car, the same sticker was found about a malfunction that the inspector glued to a crashed limousine. The incident caused unprecedented publicity and made a shocking effect not only because of the number of victims and the scale of the tragedy. Many residents of the state of New York have long known about the neglect of the owner of the rental and his family to the laws. Some guessed that the special status of the Jussein shahid is explained by contacts with the FBI - influential employees covered the agent under the cover every time he fell into trouble.

Hussein allegedly helped the FBI in the exposure of terrorists. Some suspects were sentenced to long time exclusively on the basis of his testimony

“The FBI allowed Hussein to feel that he would get away with anything,” said Katie Manley’s lawyer, who defended several people accused on the basis of the testimony of Shahid. “He, like his son, clearly did not care that the limousine is unsafe.” No less emotionally, another lawyer and political activist from Olbani Steve Downs responded about Khussein: “We seemed to be cursed. Each time we think that everything is finally over, this guy pops up again. ”

Shahid Hussein arrived in Olbani with his wife and two children from Pakistan in 1994-it seems to be like a political refugee, although by rumors a man escaped due to possible allegations of murder. Soon he opened several small enterprises, including a gas station and a shop, settled in an expensive suburb and attached children to a good school. A few months after the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, he was arrested on suspicion of forging documents. It turned out that when Khussey was deprived of the rights for the improper condition of the car, he gave a bribe an employee of the motor transport control so that he would remove information about his violations from the database.

The accusations threatened with serious problems up to the deportation-after all, suicide bombers used fake certificates who arranged a terrorist attack in New York. However, Khussein managed to agree with the FBI - in exchange for forgiveness, he promised to cooperate with the authorities and disclose real terrorists. “He lied very convincingly,” said the curator of Shahid from the special services at the trial. “As a professional actor.” Having become a “mole”, Shahid first testified against people who helped him get fake documents, then under the guise penetrated into the Afghan group of heroin dealers.

In parallel with the work on the FBI, Hussein fell into various troubles: in the summer of 2003, he announced bankruptcy, and in the fall of the same year his house burned down under mysterious circumstances. The agents who arrived at the place took a man somewhere who refused to answer questions from the fire department employees.

The most loud Operation of Khussein was the work under the cover of Albani in the mosque, where he was in confidence in the alleged commander of a terrorist cell, who escaped from Syria Imam. Shahid came to meetings with him with a device for a secret wiretapping, but, even despite the provocations, he did not achieve that approving speeches against Osama Ben Laden or the justification of terrorism. However, this did not prevent the FBI from detain a man - the fact that he did not inform the authorities about his meetings with the “terrorist” by Hussein (when he met with the victim of his provocation, he seemed to be “Malik”), considered indirect evidence of his guilt.

In court, the case almost collapsed due to the weak evidence and surface work of investigators. It turned out that another suspect turned to Imam not as a “commander”, but as a “brother”. “People conducted the investigation lazily and indifferently,” lawyer Steve Downs complained representing the interests of the accused. “This is the first case in my memory, when the authorities pursued a deliberately innocent person.” Hussain came to the aid of the FBI-Mole told how, during one of the conversations, the defendant shrugged when he heard about the impending attack on New York. By the "happy" accident, that conversation did not sign up, but the jury convinced Hussein's testimony. Imam and the owner of the pizzeria, where they met, sentenced to 15 years in prison.

Hussein received 60 thousand dollars as a reward and escaped with a fine of $ 100 for falsification of documents. Cooperation with the FBI made him inviolable. Representatives of the authorities from both parties in the state of New York defiantly refused to discuss the role of a semi-legal operative of the FBI in the accident with reporters. Shahid, a burnt house, sold three times more than market value to the buyer with an address in Tennessee, coincided with the legal address of the company of Shahid itself. For the proceeds, he bought a hotel, which was converted into an overnight stay for the poor - within the framework of the social program, their accommodation was allegedly paid from the state budget.

In the late 2000s, Khussein visited the mosque in the poor city of Newburg for more than a year, presented himself as a successful businessman and tried to calculate potential terrorists among parishioners-mainly former prisoners who were serving terms for drug storage. Hussein passed himself as a radical anti -Semite and persuaded the accomplices to blow up a military aircraft and two synagogues. At the trial, he presented the records of conversations that confirmed the readiness of the accused to participate in the terrorist attack. But Hussein himself provoked his accomplices for this conspiracy-if it weren’t for him, hardly one of them would have thought about such a crime at all.

Familiar prisoners said that one of them worked in a warehouse in a supermarket, the other combined episodic part -time jobs, the third had no permanent housing and suffered from mental disorders. Hussein methodically inspired them with ideas, for which they eventually arrested. In addition, the FBI mole promised young people a BMW car, paid leave abroad and hundreds of thousands of dollars, if they arrange a terrorist attack. Hussein and his curator Robert Fuller put themselves in the court with heroes who helped to catch dangerous criminals. In fact, they simply set up four people without any radical religious or political views, persuading them to participate in a fictitious terrorist conspiracy.

Lawyers raised the question of the trustworthiness of the chief witness: they mentioned the opaque financial fraud of Hussein, confusion with immigration documents and a possible tax fraud. However, the jury still took the side of the FBI: each of the "Newburg four", as the defendants, the press called, sentenced to 25 years in prison.

It is not known exactly what motivated Hussein to do dirty work for the FBI and destroy other people's lives. He did not need money, but enjoyed the authorities

Many journalists who worked on the controversial aspects of the “Newburg four” case were wondering about the motivation of Shahid Hussein. The accusations of forging documents were removed from him after the first task, but, by his own admission, since then he helped the FBI at least 20 times. The money from the government was also poorly interested in the immigrant-from the mid-1990s he received almost 700 thousand dollars from Pakistan, and this is only the amount that managed to disclose. It turned out that Hussein comes from a rich family, and his older brother Malik Riaz is a billionaire and one of the most influential businessmen in his homeland.

The most obvious explanation of the bizarre career of Shahid is that he enjoyed permissiveness and, thanks to his cooperation with the FBI, felt protected from any persecution. Eyewitnesses recalled that, unlike other agents under the cover, he enjoyed even the most dubious tasks - for example, when he had to provoke innocent people so that they were then accused of terrorism. When the son of the owner of the pizzeria, who, thanks to the testimony of Khussein, was sentenced to prison, accidentally stumbled upon an informant and accused him of a destroyed life, he only laughed in response. Soon, the young man was called from the FBI and explained that he no longer bought a shahid.

Even after an accident involving the Ford Excursion limousine, different departments complicated the investigation and access to a broken car to the National Security Council. There were rumors that Nauman Hussein could avoid prison, despite 20 points of prosecution, including an unconducting murder. The noise around the case was helped by the correspondent of the local newspaper Times Union Larry Rulison. He found that the state department received repeated complaints about the condition of the limousine, and also found out that the Hussain Sr. left the States during the investigation against his son and was sitting in Pakistan.

According to Rulison, in the case of hussains a certain pattern is traced: the family constantly neglects the laws and rules, relying on patronage from above. At the hotel, led by the elder brother of Nauman Haris, gas, electricity and sewage were carried out with violations. The hotel was not closed despite the unpaid real estate tax of 30 thousand dollars, and even after a five -year -old child almost died in a non -coniferous sewer sump. Inspectors recognized cars at the rolling of Khussaines worthless in 80% of cases, but this did not interfere with the owners and then risk the lives of customers daily.

The indulgences against the family of Shahid were manifested in different ways. Their drivers are less likely than in other companies, they checked for alcohol and prohibited substances. Haris escaped serious punishment even when he was driving after deprivation of his rights (before that he was discharged more than 70 fines). Limousine inspection took place in a service that did not have permission to work with cars of this type. The cooperation of the Hussein Sr. with the FBI actually freed himself and his relatives from any responsibility.

In the fall of 2020, the National Security Council on Transport published a report on the accident case. The main perpetrators of the tragedy recognized the Hussain Salon and the state transport department, which concerns the faulty transport.

After numerous transfers and appeals by the defendant, the court ended in early September 2021. Hopes for a severe punishment did not materialize - the focus of the prosecution shifted to a car service, which performed a limousine inspection without appropriate powers. Formally, Khusseyns might not know that the car had failed brakes (although in fact it is impossible to imagine such ignorance). The details of the investigation were dissolved in endless interdepartmental correspondence. Nauman concluded a deal with the prosecutor on guilty in exchange for mitigating the sentence. He did not spend a day in prison.

Retold Vasily Legueido