(
AP) The Justice Department on Tuesday settled a decades-old lawsuit filed by a group of men who were rounded up by the government in the weeks after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and held in a federal jail in New York in conditions the department’s own watchdog called abusive and harsh.
The settlement announced Tuesday calls for a $98,000 payout to be paid out among the six men who filed the suit and were held without terrorism charges at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn.
The men — Ahmer Iqbal Abbasi, Anser Mehmood, Benamar Benatta, Ahmed Khalifa, Saeed Hammouda, and Purna Raj Bajracharya — said they were detained in restrictive conditions and, in some cases, abused by members of the staff.
The settlement is somewhat unusual because federal courts at nearly every level, including the Supreme Court, had thrown out large chunks of the lawsuit.
