FBI Ignored Spain’s Doubt on Fingerprint

FBI fingerprint experts identified Portland, Ore., lawyer Brandon Mayfield as a suspect in the Madrid train bombings six days after the attacks, and investigated him even though Spanish police raised early doubts about a fingerprint match, according to court documents unsealed this week.

A federal investigator traveled to Madrid in April to try to convince police there that a print found on a bag of detonators was Mayfield’s. U.S. officials afterward said they believed the Spanish were “satisfied with the FBI laboratory’s identification,” the affidavit said.

U.S. District Judge Robert Jones on Monday dismissed the case against Mayfield and ordered that all fingerprint evidence be preserved for the purposes of investigating the FBI’s handling of the case.

Mayfield, 37, a Muslim convert, was arrested May 6 as a material witness and held until Spanish police confirmed two weeks later that the print belonged to an Algerian man.

On Tuesday, Robert Jordan, FBI special agent in charge in Portland, said he planned to meet with Mayfield to apologize. The case was an embarrassment to the FBI, which long has considered itself the gold standard when it comes to fingerprint analysis. The FBI said in a statement that it was asking “an international panel of fingerprint experts” to review the case.

In the nine-page affidavit, filed by prosecutors to obtain the material-witness warrant against Mayfield, FBI agent Richard Werder described how a lone fingerprint had led to the Portland lawyer.

Spanish police obtained the evidence from a blue plastic bag found in a stolen van near Madrid just after the March 11 explosions that killed 191 people and wounded 2,000 others. Madrid gave the FBI a copy of the print March 17.

Federal investigators came up with 20 possible matches. Terry Green, an FBI senior fingerprint examiner, narrowed it down to Mayfield, a former Army lieutenant whose prints were part of his military record. Green considered the match “to be 100% identification,” the affidavit said. Green’s conclusion was backed by three other fingerprint experts.

Spanish police, however, had expressed doubt about the match as early as mid-April, according to the affidavit. But Werder said the April 21 meeting with Spanish national police ended with all parties agreeing that the FBI finding was correct.

Mayfield’s attorney, Steve Wax, said Tuesday that this part of the affidavit appeared to be false. According to news reports from Spain, Wax said, police there were never convinced of the Mayfield connection. Wax said he believed that the FBI stretched the truth to get the warrant on Mayfield.

The FBI had no further comments about the case on Tuesday.

Tom Nelson, a Portland attorney and longtime friend of the Mayfield family, said the court papers also showed that investigators keyed in on Mayfield because he was Muslim, and because of his associations with other Muslims.

The affidavit listed those associations:

* Mayfield handled a child-custody case involving Jeffrey Battle, a member of the so-called Portland Seven terrorist cell whose members had tried to join the Taliban. Battle is serving an 18-year sentence for conspiring to levy war against the United States.

* On the first anniversary of the Sept. 11 terror attacks, someone in Mayfield’s house made a phone call to an Islamic charity run by a Muslim man now on a federal terrorism watch list.

* Mayfield’s law practice was advertised in a directory run by a man who was once a business associate of Osama bin Laden’s personal secretary.

* Mayfield was also observed by the FBI on several occasions visiting a mosque near his home in Aloha, Ore.

“None of this is worth anything in court,” said Nelson, who believes Mayfield’s Muslim connections were included in the affidavit to prejudice the grand jury. “All the FBI had was a fingerprint, and when that was gone, they had nothing.”

The FBI has laid the blame on a digitized copy of the print that it originally received from Spanish authorities. The FBI said it did not receive images of the print with the “highest possible resolution.”

Experts said the case raises basic questions about the FBI’s methodology.

“But for the fortuity of the fact that the Spanish fingerprinting examiners were able to find another match -- which was more compelling than the FBI was making -- this guy would still be in jail,” said Robert Epstein, an assistant federal public defender in Philadelphia who has challenged the FBI fingerprint techniques in court.

“Who knows how many other distorted images the FBI has made identifications on,” Epstein said. “In many cases, there is no independent verification. This shows there is no assurance against a bad identification.”

The FBI’s case against Mayfield began unraveling last week, when an e-mail from its legal attache in Madrid reported that Spanish authorities had concluded that the fingerprint belonged to somebody else.

After the FBI alerted prosecutors in Portland -- who sought a court order releasing Mayfield from custody -- the agency tdispatched two examiners to Madrid to obtain better copies of the print. On Sunday, they returned to the agency’s crime lab in Quantico, Va., and consulted with four other top fingerprint analysts.

“Using the additional information acquired this weekend in Spain, the FBI lab has now determined the latent print previously identified as a fingerprint of Mayfield to be of no value for identification purposes,” said the U.S. government’s motion to dismiss the case.

With Mayfield cleared of any wrongdoing, some of his supporters are calling for a congressional investigation of how the FBI handled the case.

Reached at home Tuesday, Mayfield’s wife, Mona, said she had heard about the FBI’s planned personal apology, but “It hasn’t happened yet.”

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Tizon reported from Seattle and Schmitt from Washington.