Zainab Ahmad

Zainab N. Ahmad (born 1980) is an American prosecutor with the United States Department of Justice who specializes in investigating and prosecuting terrorism. She served as an Assistant United States Attorney of the Eastern District of New York until 2017, successfully prosecuting several high-profile terrorism cases. In 2017, she was reassigned to the Special Counsel for the United States Department of Justice team.

Early life, education, and clerkships Born in New York City to parents who had emigrated from Punjab, Pakistan, Ahmad "grew up in suburban Nassau County, Long Island, with her father and stepmother", also spending time living with her mother in Manhattan, she attended Columbia Law School, Between 2009 and 2017, Ahmad prosecuted thirteen people charged with terrorism, winning every case. Russell Defreitas and Abdul Kadir, conspirators in the 2007 John F. Kennedy International Airport attack plot, who were convicted Najibullah Zazi and Abid Naseer, conspirators in the 2009 New York City Subway and United Kingdom plot. In 2015, Naseer was convicted by a jury and sentenced to 40 years in prison. Lawal Babafemi, a Nigerian Al Qaeda recruiter extradited to the United States. Babafemi pleaded guilty in 2014 and was sentenced to 22 years in prison the following year.

Ahmad also prosecuted Faruq Khalil Muhammad 'Isa, a Canadian national affiliated with ISIS charged with murdering five U.S. servicemen in a 2009 suicide bombing attack in Iraq. Muhammad 'Isa has pleaded not guilty and is awaiting trial. Ahmad also prosecuted Muhanad al-Farekh, an American charged with having provided material support to al Qaeda in Afghanistan. Al-Farekh has pleaded not guilty and is awaiting trial.

In the spring of 2016, Ahmad took a leave from the U.S. Attorney's Office in E.D.N.Y to work at Justice Department headquarters ("Main Justice"), at the request of Attorney General Loretta Lynch, dealing with transnational organized crime and international affairs.

Personal life Ahmad "was briefly married, to a lawyer from Jordan" before getting divorced. Ahmad is a Muslim, and says that "the primary relevance of my ethnic background to the work I do is its irrelevance", citing the rejection of terrorism by "the broader American-Muslim community".