The government filed new charges Wednesday against a New York civil rights lawyer accused of helping a jailed terrorist communicate with his followers, four months after a judge threw out the most serious of the original counts.
Prosecutors say lawyer Lynne Stewart improperly aided Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman, who is serving a life sentence for conspiring to blow up New York City landmarks and assassinate Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.
Prosecutors say she, former U.S. postal worker Ahmed Abdel Sattar and Arabic translator Mohammed Yousry helped relay messages from the cleric to a radical terrorist group based in Egypt. They have pleaded innocent.
The government earlier had charged Stewart, Sattar and Yousry with conspiring to support a terrorist organization, but a federal judge dismissed the two most serious terror counts in the original indictment.
U.S. District Judge John G. Koeltl said then that it was unconstitutionally vague to prosecute the three based on the mere use of telephones and other devices to help the sheik communicate with his followers.
The new indictment alleges the same facts but brings charges under a different section of anti-terror law suggesting Stewart and Yousry used the sheik himself as "personnel" to carry out their conspiracy.
The AP has the story here via ABCNews.com. I'd blogged about Ms. Stewart's troubles earlier here and here.