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Judge orders probe of student case to be completed this fall

NEW YORK (CNN) -- A federal judge has ordered the government to complete its investigation of why it accused an innocent college student from Egypt with making false statements in the September 11 investigation.

U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff imposed an October 31 deadline for the government's report on the case of Abdallah Higazy, 31, an engineering student from Egypt who was mistakenly accused of lying about owning a pilot's radio allegedly found in his hotel room across the street from the World Trade Center.

By issuing the order, Rakoff declined to hold an evidentiary hearing to probe the matter himself.

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A hotel security guard said he had found the hand-held radio inside Higazy's room on the 51st floor of the Millennium Hotel in Lower Manhattan in the weeks after two hijacked planes crashed into and toppled the Twin Towers.

The radio, known as a transceiver, can be used for air-to-air and air-to-ground communication.

The security guard, Ronald Ferry, 48, a former Newark police officer, told investigators he found the radio in Higazy's room safe, along with his passport and a copy of the Koran.

When Higazy returned to get his belongings last December, he denied to the FBI owning the radio, but as a one-time member of the Egyptian Air Corps, he admitted familiarity with such devices.

Later, the person who administered a lie detector test, or polygraph, to Higazy said the suspect had confessed to owning the radio, though he gave different versions of how it came into his possession.

Higazy was detained as a material witness, then charged with lying to federal agents. It was not until months later that he was released after investigators realized they made a mistake.

It was discovered that Ferry had lied to agents about finding the radio in Higazy's safe. A co-worker actually found it on a desk. Ferry pleaded guilty on February 27 to making a false statement and was sentenced in May by another judge to serve weekends in prison for six months.

An American pilot who had stayed at the hotel on the floor below actually owned of the radio.

Higazy's attorney has argued in court papers that the government used an "improperly obtained confession to induce the court to keep Higazy in jail."

The government's report is expected to include a review of possible misconduct by the polygraph examiner who reported Higazy's "false confession."

Rakoff wrote, "The alleged misbehavior here consists, worst case, of an FBI agent's taking unfair advantage of a situation created during a polygraph testing, expressly requested by the witness, to obtain from the witness a coerced or uncounseled confession that could be used to bring criminal charges against the witness."

The judge added, "Nothing in this situation remotely suggests that the FBI agent ... intended thereby to mislead the court."

Higazy, who arrived in the United States last August on a scholarship to attend Brooklyn Polytechnic University, was assigned to stay at the Millennium Hotel until his student housing was secured.

Higazy, who described Ferry's sentence as "lame," has been considering filing a civil suit against the hotel.