NEW YORK, Nov 8 (Reuters) - The prosecutor who led the case
against five men accused of conspiring to blow up New York's
John F. Kennedy Airport was appointed Monday to chief
prosecutor in the criminal division of the U.S. Attorney's
Office for the Eastern District of New York.
Marshall Miller, who has served as deputy chief of the
criminal division, will take over as chief of the criminal
division effective November 11, according to an announcement
from U.S. Attorney Loretta Lynch.
He will replace current criminal chief, Richard Donoghue,
who is leaving the Brooklyn prosecutor's office to work as
senior vice-president and litigation counsel to CA
Technologies, a software company in Islandia, New York.
According to the U.S. Attorney's Office, Miller graduated
in 1998 from Yale Law School and clerked for U.S. District
Judge Allyne Ross before joining the U.S. Attorney's Office in
October 1999.
During the past decade, Miller was chief of the violent
crimes and terrorism unit and deputy chief of the general
crimes unit.
In recent years, Miller has led some of the Eastern
District's most high-profile prosecutions within those units,
according to Lynch. He was at the helm of the investigation and
prosecution of five men convicted in an alleged plot to blow up
JFK Airport by detonating fuel pipelines and tanks. The alleged
masterminds of that plot, Russell Defreitas and Abdul Kadir,
have been sentenced to life in prison.
Miller was also a part of the investigation that led to the
indictment of Najibullah Zazi and Adis Medunajanin for
allegedly planning an attack on New York City subways in
September 2009.
LED ANTI-GANG PROGRAM
In a separate case, Miller helped secure the 2006
conviction of Shahwar Siraj, a Pakistani immigrant accused of
conspiring to blow up the 34th Street subway station in New
York on the eve of the 2004 Republican National Convention.
He also led the prosecution against four defendants who
pled guilty to charges of conspiring and attempting to buy $1
million worth of guided anti-aircraft missiles and other
military equipment to send to the Liberation Tigers of Tamil
Eelam, a U.S.-designated foreign terrorist organization.
"Over the past five years, Marshall's leadership of the
office's terrorism program has been a principal factor in
building the violent crimes and terrorism section into the
Department of Justice's premier counter-terrorism unit," Lynch
said in a statement.
As a leader of the Eastern District's anti-gang program,
Miller has also helped spearhead investigations and
prosecutions of multiple members of violent street gangs in
Brooklyn and Queens, leading to dozens of convictions.
In 2003, Miller took a leave of absence from the U.S.
Attorney's office to work as an assistant professor of law at
New York University School of Law and, in 2006, helped to start
the school's Federal Prosecution Clinic for the Eastern
District, which allows law students to assist in the
prosecution of complex and significant criminal cases.
Miller has received a number of awards for his work as a
federal prosecutor, including the 2011 Attorney General's Award
for Excellence in Furthering the Interests of U.S. National
Security, and the New York City Bar Association's Henry L.
Stimson Medal for outstanding assistant U.S. attorneys in the
Eastern and Southern Districts of New York.
(Reporting by Jessica Dye)
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(A previous version of this version referred to Marshall
Miller as Marshall.)