A man who spent 16 years in prison for the murder of a Brooklyn rabbi has filed a wrongful conviction lawsuit alleging "blatantly illegal investigative tactics" were used by the Brooklyn District Attorney's office to secure his conviction.

Last June, Jabbar Collins was released from prison when prosecutors told a federal court judge that they were abandoning their efforts to retry him for the 1994 murder of Rabbi Abram Pollack. The district attorney vacated the murder conviction in May when evidence surfaced that one of the witnesses who implicated Collins had temporarily recanted, and prosecutors failed to inform Collins's trial lawyer of it. The story of how Collins managed to overturn his murder conviction while in prison was the subject of a front-page Wall Street Journal article in December.

On Wednesday, Collins and his attorney, Joel Rudin, filed the lawsuit in Brooklyn federal court naming the city, Brooklyn prosecutor Michael Vecchione and eight other prosecutors and detectives as defendants. Jerry Schmetterer, a spokesman for the district attorney's office, declined to comment.

Vecchione led the prosecution during the original Collins murder trial in 1995. Much of the lawsuit concerns Vecchione's alleged conduct during the murder investigation and that trial.

At a hearing in 2010 on a possible retrial for Collins, a witness testified that Vecchione threatened to hit him over the head with a coffee table when he refused to cooperate. Among a long list of allegations of misconduct is a new charge that several notarized or sworn affirmations and affidavits purportedly signed by Vecchione were forged by a paralegal.