GARDEN CITY, N.Y. (AP) — On a September day in 2020, New York City Police Officer Baimadajie Angwang kissed his toddler goodbye and was about to drive to work when he was surrounded by rifle-toting FBI agents.
You’re under arrest, the bewildered cop was told. The charge: Being a secret agent for China.
Angwang, a former U.S. Marine, spent six months in a federal detention center before he was freed on bail while awaiting trial on charges that he fed information about New York’s Tibetan community to officials at the Chinese consulate in New York.
Then, just as suddenly, it was over. Federal prosecutors in Brooklyn dropped the charges Jan. 19, saying only that they were acting “in the interest of justice.” They didn’t explain further.
Now Angwang says he wants to be reinstated to the police force, which suspended him with pay while the case was pending. But more than that, he wants answers.
“Why did you start the investigation on me? Why did you drop all the charges?” said Angwang, who was born in Tibet but was granted political asylum in the U.S. as a teenager.
“We want an explanation. We’re demanding it because you owe me,” he said during an interview at his attorney’s office. “You can’t just put me in jail for six months and ruin my name, ruin my reputation and give all this stress to my family members and friends, and then you say, ‘in the interest of justice.’ You just going to leave it like that?”
China’s Communist Party has ruled over Tibet for seven decades and China has claimed a vast stretch of the Himalayas as part of its territory since the 13th century. But the relationship has been fraught with tension, with many Tibetans — some in exile — seeking independence.
The original charge against Angwang was that he began supplying information to Chinese officials on Tibetan independence groups in New York in 2018.
In court documents, prosecutors said Angwang was a threat to national security. He was charged with being an…
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