(Mercury News) Last week, a federal judge ruled that the Department of Justice had failed to prove something it insisted for years was true: that a Fremont man tried to travel to Syria in 2015, to join a terrorist organization.
U.S. District Judge William H. Orrick ruled that while 25-year-old Adam Shafi used a fraudulent $2,200 check to travel to the Middle East, he hadn’t done so with the intent to assist a Syrian terrorist group known as Al Nusra Front. The judge’s ruling ends a nearly four-year saga that included widespread media coverage, a mistrial and wildly different theories from both sides.
Prosecutors accused Shafi of terrorism in 2015, and he became the subject of a New York Times piece on American parents whose children join terror groups. But in 2018, a jury deadlocked 8-4 in favor of acquitting Shafi of aligning himself with terrorists.
