A federal judge has agreed to hear new evidence in a California terrorism case notorious for the government’s false claims that it had uncovered an Al Qaeda sleeper cell in rural America.

Lawyers for Hamid Hayat, a 34-year-old Pakistani-American convicted after one of the first post-9/11 terrorism investigations by the FBI, will be able to present evidence to support his claim that he is entitled to a new trial because his lawyer failed her client.

“Finally, after 11 years, the bankruptcy of this conviction is going to be exposed at this hearing,” said Dennis Riordan, Hayat’s appeals lawyer. “It’s going to be obvious that, not only should he have prevailed at trial, but that he’s factually innocent.”

Hayat’s appeals lawyers claim that his trial lawyer, Wazhma Mojaddidi, failed her client in several ways, including not calling alibi witnesses, not applying for a security clearance to see the government’s evidence against her client, and not having her client testify.

A spokeswoman for the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of California declined to comment on last week’s court order. Mojaddidi did not return calls to her law office. Hayat’s appeals lawyer said that he’d sent the decision to Hayat but hadn’t heard back from him.

The case was the subject of a November 2016 series in The Intercept that uncovered new evidence in the case, including doubts about the credibility of the government’s undercover informant and expert testimony about the terrorist training camp Hayat is alleged to have attended.

In the court order filed on Wednesday, U.S. Magistrate Judge Deborah Barnes wrote that Hayat’s claims about his trial lawyer “raise serious questions concerning the competency of the defense.”

Stanford Law Prof. Robert Weisberg, a criminal law expert who has written critically about the performance of Hayat’s trial lawyer, called the judge’s decision to hear new evidence “significant.”

“It’s a pretty striking opinion, very well reasoned,” Weisberg said.

No date has been set for the evidentiary hearing. A status conference in the case will be held on June 23 in federal court in Sacramento to discuss logistics and a hearing date. At that time, the court will also consider defense claims that prosecutors withheld key evidence, including information about the terrorist training camp.