SEATTLE – A gun collector once jailed as a material witness in the assassination of a federal prosecutor is seeking a change of venue for an unrelated weapons charge.
Albert K. Kwan of Bellevue says he cannot get a fair trial on the charge – possession of an unregistered machine gun – because in the public’s mind, his case “is inseparably intertwined with that of the murder investigation of Assistant United States Attorney Thomas C. Wales,” his lawyers wrote in a court filing this week.
Wales, an 18-year veteran of the U.S. attorney’s office in Seattle and the president of the gun-control group Washington CeaseFire, was shot as he worked in the basement of his home in Seattle’s Queen Anne Hill neighborhood on Oct. 11, 2001. The murder weapon was a Makarov pistol outfitted with a replacement barrel.
A nationwide search for the gun led the FBI to Kwan, who, agents say, purchased two of the barrels from a Minnesota company but has only turned over one of them. Kwan says he doesn’t recall ever purchasing a second barrel.
In searching Kwan’s home in January 2005, agents found what they say was an illegal, unregistered M-14. Kwan was charged with the gun count last month, although his attorneys say the weapon didn’t meet the definition of a machine gun because parts had been welded to prevent it from firing automatically.
Last week, Kwan’s lawyers filed court papers saying he would fully cooperate with the grand jury.
Kwan’s lead attorney, Joe Conte, said Wednesday he did not expect U.S. District Judge Thomas Zilly to move Kwan’s trial on the weapons charge out of the Western District of Washington.
Kwan was held for three weeks in January 2005 as a material witness in the Wales case. Conte said in the court filing that because of the news coverage, potential jurors are likely to “equate defendant’s prosecution with the first killing of a federal prosecutor in our nation’s history.”
Conte has said his client was not involved in Wales’ death.
The U.S. attorney’s office did not have any immediate response to the request.
An attachment to a separate filing by Kwan’s lawyers sheds light on the FBI’s search for Makarov replacement barrels.
The attachment says that the two barrels Kwan is alleged to have purchased were among 69 shipped by the Minnesota company, Federal Arms Corp., to addresses within a 50-mile radius of Wales’ home. As of January 2005, the FBI had yet to locate 30 of them.
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