Dog team leader says he saw torn fabric in Al-Amin search
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Posted 4:07PM on Thursday, February 28, 2002
ATLANTA - An Alabama prison guard who led a team of dogs to search for Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin testified Thursday that he saw a torn piece of fabric near a pistol used to kill a police officer two years ago. <br>
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Dog team leader Captain Bruce Vermilyer said he followed the barking dogs for almost an hour until he heard Al-Amin was arrested. He said he noticed the fabric on the fence when he went to the area where Al-Amin was being held. <br>
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Police said Al-Amin's shirt was torn when he was arrested in the woods in White Hall, Alabama -- four days after the shootout. An FBI agent testified Wednesday that he saw a torn piece of denim dangling from a barbed wire fence a few feet from a Browning nine millimeter pistol. <br>
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Al-Amin -- the '60s radical once known as H. Rap Brown -- is on trial for the murder of Fulton County sheriff's deputy Ricky Kinchen and the wounding of Deputy Aldranon English in March 2000. Prosecutors are seeking the death penalty. <br>
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English has testified that it was Al-Amin who turned on the deputies with an assault rifle as they tried to serve him with a warrant in Atlanta's West End neighborhood. <br>
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Al-Amin's attorneys say it's a case of mistaken identity and that he was arrested as part of a government conspiracy that has dogged him since his days as a high-profile Black Panther.