Wayne County Medical Examiner Carl Schmidt took issue this week with an independent autopsy report of Imam Luqman Abdullah which concluded that marks on the imam's face and arms were caused by an FBI canine.

Abdullah was shot and killed by FBI agents during a raid last October when agents attempted to arrest him on conspiracy and weapons charges. FBI agents say that Abdullah fired three times before they returned fire. Since then, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) has waged a campaign to cast the shooting as excessive and inappropriate.

Among the claims is a theory that Abdullah may have fired simply to protect himself from an attack by an FBI dog at the scene of the arrest. CAIR's Michigan chapter hired pathologist Cyril Wecht to do a second autopsy based only on the original autopsy pictures. It was released earlier this month.

In addition to pointing out what he believed to be dog bites, Wecht's report disputed the original autopsy's claim that the imam's jaw was broken from a fall, concluding instead that it was broken as a result of the dog's attack. He publically questioned Schmidt's report, asking why he didn't include the dog bites and lacerations. Now he is saying that the Wayne County Medical Examiner needs to explain where "those jagged, irregular-shaped lacerations come from."

Schmidt told the Detroit Free Press that "there is nothing you can point to that shows it's a dog bite."

"When a dog bites, it punctures," Schmidt said. "If you look at the pictures, he has no puncture wounds on his cheek." He also presented pictures of an actual dog bite victim, showing what Abdullah's face may have looked like if a dog had bitten him.

Despite criticism due to the independent report, Schmidt stands firms in his original conclusions that the marks just don't look like dog bites and that the fractured jaw was from a fall, not the force of an attack. "We can only describe what we see," he added.

An affidavit submitted by an FBI agent placed Abdullah as a leader of a radical group whose "primary mission is to establish a separate, sovereign Islamic state within the borders of the United States."