False Statement

A 15-year-old girl has been charged as a juvenile with making a false statement to police when she alleged last week that she had been raped on a trail near Old Mill High School in Millersville. Anne Arundel County Police spokesman Lt. Joseph E. Jordan said the teen, an Old Mill student, made the statement last Tuesday, alleging that a group of men raped her that morning on a wooded path near the school. She later recanted. Also last week, another Old Mill High student claimed she had been raped at the school but later admitted she hadn't been assaulted.

NEW YORK - In a case with broad implications for civil liberties and America's war on terrorism, an outspoken civil rights lawyer and two colleagues were convicted yesterday of conspiring to smuggle information to an imprisoned Egyptian cleric and helping him communicate incendiary messages to terrorists around the world. After 13 days of deliberations, a federal jury convicted attorney Lynne Stewart on charges of giving material support to international terrorists and making false statements to the U.S. government.

Howard County police arrested a man at Wilde Lake High School yesterday morning and accused him of threatening two teenagers with a handgun and bringing the gun onto the school parking lot as students were arriving for classes. Edward Brown, 62, of Jason Lane in Columbia was charged with first-degree assault and possession of a gun on school property, police said. Officers received a call about 7:10 a.m. from a person who heard a car alarm, looked out his window and saw a man with a gun get into a maroon Porsche on Jason Lane.

A Nottingham reader bought an older home in October. Before settlement, she had a home inspection and a walk-through done. No water problems were observed. Twelve days after settlement, the buyer saw water near a basement wall. She contacted the former owner, who told her that twice he had major incidents involving water in the basement, both of which he corrected. The owner said he had told the buyer and her real estate agent about the problems when they first viewed the home. The buyer said the owner never mentioned water problems.

BOSTON - Massachusetts Financial Services Co., the U.S. mutual fund unit of Canada's Sun Life Financial Inc., was notified by the Securities and Exchange Commission yesterday that it might face enforcement action for misleading investors about its policy on market timing. The SEC is alleging that MFS fund prospectuses made "false and misleading" statements about market timing, said Sun Life spokesman Nicholas Thomas in Toronto. Market timing involves buying a fund's shares and then quickly selling them.

William Otto Schmidbauer, a former real estate broker convicted in April of a federal conspiracy charge, is scheduled to be sentenced this morning in a series of fraudulent property transactions that cost the government $2.5 million. Schmidbauer, a former Perry Hall real estate broker who was one of the prominent property flippers in Baltimore, pleaded guilty in U.S. District Court in Baltimore to a single count of conspiracy to make false statements. In a plea agreement with prosecutors, Schmidbauer, 64, also agreed to forfeit $690,000 in profits on deals financed by mortgages that he fraudulently obtained from federally insured institutions for his buyers.

Carroll man charged with falsely claiming terrorist poison plot A 38-year-old Carroll County man has been charged with lying to authorities about supposed terrorist activities by falsely claiming that his roommate planned to put rat poison in food at the market where he works, according the state police at the Westminster barracks. John William Tyler of the 700 block of Humbert Schoolhouse Road in northern Carroll County surrendered yesterday afternoon, after state and federal agencies had spent three days investigating what seemed to be a believable report, police said.

Baltimore police Lt. Robert R. Richards, who has had a stormy relationship with the department, has been found guilty of several infractions by a trial board and is awaiting word on whether he will be fired. A three-member board, composed of a Baltimore County lieutenant and a captain and lieutenant with the Maryland Transportation Authority Police, tried Richards on 14 charges this month. He was found guilty of nine, including making false statements and insubordination, said his attorney, Domenic Iamele.

On Sept. 11, after the terrorist attacks on New York's World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Maryland officials evacuated the State House complex in Annapolis and the World Trade Center in Baltimore because they had received what they thought was a credible tip that both could be attack targets. But it was all a hoax. Yesterday, the man who police say placed a prank call to the Maryland Emergency Management Agency was given probation before judgment by Baltimore Circuit Judge John M. Glynn, which means he won't have a criminal record if he abides by the terms of probation.

The former head of a Harford County aerospace manufacturer falsely inflated revenue figures in 1999, then cashed in hundreds of stock shares at artificially high prices, according to a federal indictment unsealed yesterday. Edward A. Kiley, former president of Alcore Inc., collected more than $33,000 in December 1999 from the sale of 2,500 shares of Alcore's former parent company, Advanced Technical Products Inc., the indictment said. In the months leading up to that sale, Kiley filed false financial statements with the Securities and Exchange Commission, inflating revenue for the second quarter of 1999 by $2.5 million and for the third quarter by $3.75 million, according to the indictment.