In brief: AG: Findings of Ferguson probe to be released soon

Washington – Attorney General Eric Holder said Tuesday that he soon will announce the findings of a federal criminal investigation into the police shooting death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, as well as an administrative review of that police department’s use-of-force policies and its relations with the black community there.

“My hope is that we will do this before I leave office, and I’m confident that we will do that – though I guess it’s ultimately up to Congress as to when I actually leave office,” he said at a Washington news conference.

Holder announced last year that he was stepping down after six years as attorney general in the Obama administration. The president nominated U.S. Attorney Loretta Lynch to replace him. She has testified at a Senate confirmation hearing, and Congress is expected to take up her nomination when it returns from its weeklong Presidents Day vacation next week.

Head of U.S. Islamic school charged with sexual assault

Chicago – The longtime head of a suburban Chicago Islamic school has been charged with sexually assaulting a woman who worked there, and a civil suit filed Tuesday accuses him of abusing that employee and three teenage students.

Mohammad Abdullah Saleem, 75 – who founded the Institute of Islamic Education and is regarded as a leading Islamic scholar, or imam, in the United States – is charged with felony criminal sexual abuse. Prosecutors said he abused the 23-year-old woman, an administrative assistant at the Elgin school, in a series of escalating incidents over months.

The civil suit accuses Saleem of abusing that employee, as well as three female students at the school as far back as the 1980s. The lawyer in that case, Steven Denny, said Saleem took advantage of both the trust accorded to him as a religious leader and of the tendency of Muslims to remain silent on matters of sex and sexual abuse.

“This place was ripe for abuse,” Denny told a news conference.