According to AP reporting, Richard Hatfill's libel suit against the NY times has been dismissed. Hatfil had been identified by the FBI as a person of interest in their investigation of the anthrax poisonings of 2001 which killed 5 people and made an additional 17 people sick.
His lawyers had argued that even if Hatfill qualified as a public figure, they could still prevail at trial because they had uncovered serious flaws in the reporting of columnist Nicholas Kristof.
http://www.usatoday.com/...
Previous reporting from the AP
Lawyers for a former Army scientist suing The New York Times for libel said Friday that an editor at the paper warned columnist Nicholas Kristof to remove incriminating passages from a column that raised suspicions that Steven Hatfill was involved in the 2001 anthrax attacks.
Kristof left the passages in the May 2002 column despite the warning, said lawyers for Hatfill,
...
[Mark] Grannis [one of Hatfil's lawyers] said that in addition to the editor's warning, several of Kristof's sources testified in pretrial depositions that they did not provide the information Kristof has said they did.
"Mr. Kristof made things up," Grannis said. "What Mr. Kristof reported was not just false, it was embarrassingly false. It was outrageously false."
http://news.yahoo.com/...
Hatfil is also suing the Justice Department and John Ascroft claiming that they violated his civil rights.