FBI Error

A federal judge in Portland, Ore., on Monday threw out the case against an American lawyer jailed for two weeks as a material witness in the Madrid train bombing. The Federal Bureau of Investigation said it had mistakenly matched his fingerprints with prints on a plastic bag found near the scene of the attacks that killed 191 people last March.



F.B.I. officials said that the erroneous fingerprint evidence against the lawyer, Brandon Mayfield, 37, of Aloha, Ore., stemmed from the poor quality of a digital image of the print sent from Spain and that they were conducting a review into the use of such procedures.