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| Federal prosecutors in Brooklyn have moved to dismiss a case against a New York City police officer charged with providing Chinese consular officials with intelligence about Tibetans living in the United States, according to court documents. |
| The move to drop the charges against the officer, Baimadajie Angwang, came about two years after he was accused of acting as an illegal agent of the Chinese government and several other federal crimes, court documents show. |
| A trial had been scheduled for July, but in a filing on Friday, prosecutors asked that the indictment against Officer Angwang be dismissed “in the interests of justice” because of the emergence of “additional information bearing on the charges.” |
| The filing does not provide details about that information, and a spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office in Brooklyn, which brought the charges, declined to comment. The judge overseeing the case had not responded to the prosecutors’ request as of Monday. |
| Officer Angwang’s lawyer, John F. Carman, welcomed the government’s move to dismiss the charges, which he called “long overdue.” He said he expected the judge to order the dismissal, which was first reported by NBC New York. |
| “The anguish and expense that this police officer and Marine Corps veteran has endured is not easily described,” Mr. Carman said in a statement. “We are optimistic that the court will grant the motion and that this great American will have the opportunity to repair untold damage to his life.” |
| The charges against Officer Angwang came amid growing concern on the part of law enforcement authorities in the United States and other Western countries about Beijing’s efforts to monitor Chinese nationals abroad, including dissidents. |
| Officer Angwang, 36, was born in Tibet, according to court records. Tibet, an autonomous region in China, has been a flash point in U.S.-China relations for decades. Beijing considers the region part of its historic empire, but many Tibetans believe it was illegally incorporated into China in 1951 and have pressed for independence. The Chinese government has long viewed the independence movement as a threat to its stability. |
| As a teenager, Officer Angwang was taken into custody by the Chinese authorities, interrogated and beaten for expressing opposition to China’s oppression of his homeland, court records show. |
| He came to the United States at 17 on a cultural exchange visa and later applied for, and was granted, political asylum, court filings show. He joined the Marines in 2009, spent seven months in Afghanistan, became a U.S. citizen in 2010, was honorably discharged in 2014 and then enlisted in the Army reserves, court records show. |
| In 2016, Officer Angwang joined the Police Department, where he was a patrol officer and, at the time of his arrest in September 2020, a community affairs officer with the 111th Precinct in Queens. |
| Prosecutors cited recorded phone calls in charging Officer Angwang and said he had reported regularly to two Chinese consular officials in New York on the activities of ethnic Tibetans. One of the officials was responsible for “neutralizing sources of potential opposition to the policies and authority” opposed to the Chinese government’s policies and authority, court filings said. |
| But Mr. Carman, Officer Angwang’s lawyer, argued that the conversations described by prosecutors as “nefarious” were actually “pedestrian” efforts by his client to maintain good relations with Chinese officials so that he could obtain a visa to visit his parents in China and to introduce them to his daughter. |
| “It is in this light that the court should assess Mr. Angwang’s solicitous tone and accommodating posture,” in his communications with one of the consular officials, Mr. Carman writes in one filling. |
| On Monday, Ashwin Verghese, a spokesman for International Campaign for Tibet, an advocacy group, said the lack of “clear details” about why prosecutors had moved to dismiss the case did not “negate the fact that” Officer Angwang had engaged in “close interaction with Chinese diplomats in New York, unusual for a Tibetan who has sought asylum in the United States.” |
| Officer Angwang was suspended without pay by the Police Department and discharged from the Army Reserve after he was charged. He was restored to the police payroll but remained suspended after being freed on bail in 2021, Mr. Carman said. |
| Neither the Army nor the Police Department responded to requests for comment about Officer Angwang’s status. Mr. Carman said in an interview that he did not know how the anticipated dismissal of the federal charges might affect his client’s possible return to active duty as a police officer. |
| “Hopefully that opportunity is there if he wants it,” Mr. Carman said. |
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