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11 jihad suspects various ethnicities { August 8 2003 } Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A31586-2003Aug7.htmlhttp://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A31586-2003Aug7.html
Va. 'Jihad' Suspects: 11 Men, Two Views
U.S. Sees Conspiracy; They Proclaim Piety
By Mary Beth Sheridan, Caryle Murphy and Jerry Markon
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, August 8, 2003; Page A01
Randall "Ismail" Royer, a lanky, fair-haired Washington activist, had just returned from Pakistan, where he had tried to lend his American PR savvy to a group of Muslim insurgents fighting in the disputed Himalayan region of Kashmir.
His friends were fascinated by his trip. So they gathered over chicken and rice one summer night in Northern Virginia and pressed him for details.
Like Royer, the friends were middle-class Muslim men from the Washington suburbs. Three had been classmates at Prince George's Community College. Two were immigrants launching high-tech careers. One was a popular local lecturer who was pursuing a scientific doctorate.
"I'm a supporter of the Kashmiri independence movement," Royer, 30, of Falls Church, said later in an interview, referring to the Lashkar-i-Taiba organization, which is fighting to end Indian control over much of Kashmir. "I've helped so many Muslim groups. I saw this group as not a terrorist group. I didn't see this as inconsistent with being American."
U.S. authorities think otherwise. Last month, the government accused Royer and 10 other Muslim men of being part of a conspiracy to support "violent jihad" overseas. In the months after that June 2000 dinner, the indictment says, at least six of Royer's friends followed him to Pakistan, some training with weapons at Lashkar camps there. Two fired at Indian troops, the indictment says.
Prosecutors have trumpeted the case as a key step in the war on terrorism, though the men were not accused of planning attacks against the United States. In fact, while prosecutors have said they plan to upgrade the charges, the men remain accused under a nearly century-old, seldom-enforced law forbidding Americans to carry out military expeditions against nations friendly with the United States. They have pleaded not guilty.
The men appear stunned to find themselves in the cross hairs of the war on terrorism. Many of their neighbors and friends describe them as quiet residents who blended easily into the Washington suburbs, working at places such as Verizon, Home Depot and Booz Allen Hamilton and spending their off hours fixing cars or poring through books at Borders. They say the men enjoyed guns and sports but also were settling down and starting families.
Most of the 11 men have declined to speak publicly. Their story has emerged from court documents and interviews with dozens of their relatives, friends, professors and lawyers.
It is a story of a circle of friends in their twenties and thirties who met at paintball games in the Spotsylvania County countryside or at lectures at an Islamic center. No one is claiming that they are like the shadowy foreigners involved in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
Nine are U.S. citizens, several of them registered voters. Three have served in the U.S. military. All but one live in the Washington area. They have varied backgrounds: three are African Americans; five are of Middle Eastern descent; one is a South Korean immigrant and naturalized citizen; two are white.
One thing they have in common is a devotion to Islam.
The government says that devotion turned into a desire to engage in violent jihad. Prosecutors say the men possessed assault rifles, a sniper rifle and ammunition and practiced military tactics while playing paintball. They allege that the men used aliases with each other. In court, prosecutors said one of them was in contact with a Northern Virginia man, now in custody in Saudi Arabia, who belongs to Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network.
Furthermore, prosecutors say, Lashkar-i-Taiba was no mere independence movement. It killed civilians as well as Indian soldiers and had contacts with radical Islamic groups in Afghanistan and elsewhere, experts and government officials say. The U.S. government declared Lashkar a terrorist group in December 2001.
The men's defenders say they owned guns legally, played paintball for fun and were involved with Lashkar only before it was declared a terrorist group. Some of the supporters argue that the indictment is part of a broader American campaign against religious Muslims.
"I came to realize they [the government] have this new thing of wanting to prevent terrorism instead of investigating after it happens," Royer said days before his arrest, likening the FBI's actions to those of the "pre-crime" unit in the movie "Minority Report."
"The policy is to look for any tiny thing they can bust people on, to arrest them, to have them under control," he said.
Royer is at the center of the government's case. He might seem an unusual advocate for Muslim causes: a blond, blue-eyed man who grew up in suburban St. Louis and came to Washington for college.
His father remembers the 1994 phone call that would signal his son's new direction. "When he was at American University, he called and said he had a chance to do some traveling. . . . He told me he was going to Istanbul, then Slovenia. Then he left the best to last. That he was going to go to Bosnia."
Bosnia -- a land torn by war between a Muslim-led government and ethnic Serb forces.
"I won't tell your mother," the elder Royer said he told his son.
It was hardly the first time Royer had surprised his parents. Ramon Royer, a photographer, and his wife, Nancy, a Catholic nun turned teacher, expected the unexpected from their opinionated, free-thinking son. As a teenager, he had briefly sported dreadlocks. At 19, he converted to Islam. Now he was off to help refugees in Bosnia, driven by the images he saw on television.
But Royer soon decided that humanitarian work wasn't enough. He felt as if he was feeding people who would die anyway, he recalled recently. "It's better to . . . in some way help them from dying," Royer said. "I made the intention I was going to enlist in their army."
For four months, Royer says, he fought in a unit supporting Bosnian troops. The cause had drawn other foreigners, too -- Muslim combatants from the Middle East. From them, Royer learned about Lashkar-i-Taiba, one of the largest groups fighting to oust India from mostly Muslim Kashmir.
By 1997, Royer was back in Washington. He had a white-collar job, working on civil rights and media issues for the Council on American-Islamic Relations. He and his Bosnian wife, Mirsada, were settling down and eventually would have four children.
But his interest in distant lands hadn't waned.
On April 10, 2000, the young American traveled abroad, this time to Pakistan. Royer says he wrote press releases for Lashkar. The indictment says he also fired at Indian positions -- a charge he denies.
Royer stayed only three weeks and recalls spending half the trip in bed with food poisoning. But the experience was powerful. Soon, according to both him and prosecutors, Royer became the contact for a series of Washington area men who wanted to visit the Kashmir insurgents themselves.
Debate has swirled for years in Washington on whether to declare Lashkar a terrorist group. Lashkar, the armed wing of a Pakistani-based Sunni Muslim organization, has carried out cross-border attacks in Kashmir since 1993, targeting Indian troops and civilians, according to the State Department.
It has hundreds of members, mostly Pakistanis, who have trained in camps in Pakistan, Kashmir and Afghanistan, the State Department says. Its leader, Hafiz Mohamed Saeed, reportedly has praised bin Laden, and al Qaeda fighters have been found in homes linked to Lashkar members.
However, experts say, the group's philosophy is different from al Qaeda's. Before last year, Lashkar operated openly in Pakistan, offering social services and religious classes in addition to military-style training. The group was so close to Pakistan's intelligence agency that some U.S. officials opposed putting it on the terrorism list, believing such a move could undermine the country's leadership.
Lashkar fighters "definitely use terrorist tactics against India and against moderate Kashmiris who don't toe their line," said Selig Harrison, director of the Asia Project at the Center for International Policy. But "I don't know of any evidence they are planning to operate on the international level, in the United States, for example."
Dar Al Arqam is a little-known Islamic center in Falls Church, with none of the grandeur of an important religious center. It is tucked into a beige three-story office building on South Washington Street next to a carpet dealer, an Asian import gallery and a Latino grocery.
It would be easy to miss -- except on nights when crowds gather to hear popular speakers.
In recent years, Royer and his friends met periodically at the center, which promotes an orthodox version of Islam known as salafi, the Arabic word for "predecessors." The draw: a young, articulate preacher, who eventually became a spiritual leader to the men.
Ali al-Timimi is an unusual figure in Washington's Muslim community. He is the U.S.-born son of Iraqi immigrants and does cutting-edge scientific research as a doctoral candidate at George Mason University. But to Muslim followers, Timimi, 39, is known more for his speeches. The indictment suggests that Timimi was a major reason the young men supported Lashkar, though Timimi is not charged with wrongdoing.
Among those frequenting Timimi's talks was Ibrahim Ahmed al-Hamdi of Alexandria. Hamdi, 25, the son of a Yemeni diplomat, has lived in the Washington area since his teenage years, studying at Northern Virginia Community College and Strayer University, according to his attorney and court documents.
He was the first to follow Royer to Pakistan, raising $4,000 for the trip by selling his car, according to the indictment. During a month-long trip starting in August 2000, he visited a Lashkar training camp and fired on Indian positions in Kashmir, the indictment says.
His attorney, Salim Ali, denies it. "He didn't fire at an Indian position. He just fired a gun," he said. "Whatever they say about him [in the indictment] they got from him" in interviews.
Next to visit Pakistan was Seifullah Chapman, the indictment alleges. Chapman is a California native, the son of Canadian-born parents, and served as a U.S. Marine, according to a 2001 application for a job as a security guard in Fairfax County. He became interested in Islam through his second wife, a Muslim, according to a family friend, Rosemary Engen. Chapman, 30, of Alexandria, who has thick auburn hair and a beard to match, had just finished a bachelor's degree in criminal justice at Marymount University in Arlington when he headed for Pakistan.
"This is a very high-energy, committed, conscientious, intelligent person," said one of his professors, Michael Bolton, a Navy veteran who said he never heard Chapman criticize the United States.
But the man who hired Chapman as a security guard recalled Chapman saying "things like America is going down the wrong path and that someday they will pay."
The former employer, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said Chapman was fired after he stopped showing up for work shortly after Sept. 11, 2001. According to the indictment, Chapman was at a Lashkar camp near Muzafrabad, Pakistan, at that time.
A few days after Sept. 11, Royer and a somber group of friends met at the Fairfax condominium of Yong Ki Kwon, a South Korean immigrant and convert to Islam. The nation was reeling from the terrorist attacks on New York and the Pentagon, and the men feared retaliation against Muslims.
According to the indictment, someone identified as Unindicted Conspirator No. 1 told the men that it was time to go abroad and join violent jihad in such places as Kashmir, Chechnya, Afghanistan and Indonesia. He added that U.S. troops were legitimate targets, the indictment says. Several sources close to the case say Unindicted Conspirator No. 1 is Timimi.
But participants at the meeting say the spiritual leader gave an altogether different message: that they should go abroad for security if they were feeling harassed in the post-Sept. 11 climate. Asked about the meeting, Timimi told The Washington Post in an e-mail that U.S. Muslims were universal in their condemnation of the terrorist attacks. He recalled counseling "those who are worried of a backlash and have the opportunity to travel to a Muslim land, then that is an alternative." He said he has never condoned killing Americans.
Shortly after the meeting, four of the friends left for Pakistan.
Three were of Pakistani origin: kitchen designer Masoud Ahmad Khan of Gaithersburg, son of a Pakistani-born professor and an American mother; Khwaja Mahmood Hasan of Fairfax, who immigrated as a teenager and worked in high tech; and Mohammed Aatique, a Pakistani communications engineer who worked in the Philadelphia area. They were allegedly joined by Kwon, who had attended Virginia Tech with Aatique.
Khan's attorney, Danny Onaranto, said his client traveled to Pakistan in part because of the hostility shown to Muslims in the United States. Hasan's attorney, Thomas Abbenante, acknowledged that his client had gone to a Lashkar camp but said he trained for "at most three to four weeks" when the group had not yet been outlawed.
Hasan's father, Khwaja S. Hasan, said he could not even imagine the young man handling a firearm: "He's so tender, he's so soft-hearted, he cries easily."
The indictment paints a different portrait. The four men, it says, went to a Lashkar camp where they fired AK-47 assault rifles, 12mm antiaircraft guns, machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades.
In a telephone conversation in April, Royer and Kwon recalled the advice of Timimi, according to a government transcript presented in court.
"What I heard him [Timimi] saying was . . . go be with the mujaheddin [Muslim fighters] anywhere in the world, or something like this," Royer said.
"Right, right," Kwon said.
" . . . [Because] this is a threat," Royer added.
"He did say that, go be with the mujaheddin, it doesn't matter where," Kwon said.
Royer added: "Right . . . which I interpreted as meaning, was with the Lashkar-i-Taiba, and this group at the time . . . yeah, was not a terrorist organization."
At the end of 2001, three others in the Muslim group were being urged by their peers to serve with Lashkar, according to the indictment. The three were friends who had studied at Prince George's Community College: Hammad Abdur-Raheem of Falls Church and Donald T. Surratt of Suitland, who both had served in the U.S. military and converted to Islam; and Caliph Basha Ibn Abdur-Raheem, who had moved to Arlington from New Jersey and is not related to Hammad. They did not go to Pakistan.
But visiting Lashkar at that time was more problematic. In late December 2001, the U.S. government designated Lashkar a terrorist organization and announced that it would be illegal for Americans to support it. The decision was made after Lashkar was accused in a suicide attack on the Indian parliament that killed 14 people.
For Royer and others in the group, Kashmir was part of a pantheon of international causes including Bosnia, Chechnya and the Palestinian territories.
"It's a civil rights issue, a sovereignty issue, a human rights issue," Royer said, noting, however, that he stopped supporting Lashkar after the group was banned.
Even if Lashkar was not outlawed during the trips, prosecutors suggest that the men were up to something illegal.
The indictment alleges that several of them obtained assault rifles similar to AK-47s to become familiar with the weapons used by mujaheddin in Bosnia, Chechnya, Kashmir and other areas. It says the friends practiced military techniques, at times during their paintball outings, and used code names while dealing with Lashkar.
Prosecutors argue that, in the post-Sept. 11 world, they must act before terror attacks occur.
"President Bush has said that in our war on terrorism we are not going to wait until the worst dangers are upon us," U.S. Attorney Paul J. McNulty said as he announced the indictment against the men.
In recent hearings in U.S. District Court in Alexandria, prosecutors have introduced evidence in an effort to convince a judge that the men are dangerous. They said the 11th defendant, Sabri Benkahla, a Falls Church man who has done graduate study in Saudi Arabia, appeared to have contacts with a man they described as an al Qaeda member. That man, Ahmed Abu-Ali of Falls Church, who also was a part of the paintball group, was taken into custody by Saudi authorities in connection with the May 12 bombings in Riyadh, though he has not been charged. Abu-Ali's attorney, Ashraf Nubani, denied that he belongs to al-Qaeda or had anything to do with the bombings.
A federal judge allowed Benkahla's release on bond. That ruling has been appealed. Three other defendants have been freed pending the trial, set to begin Nov. 17.
Meanwhile, federal prosecutors say they are also trying to corroborate a witness statement that the Northern Virginia men ultimately planned to kill U.S. soldiers. They did not name the witness, and the men's attorneys have denied any such intention.
The men never thought their actions could land them in serious trouble.
"Here's the thing, brother. Here's the crazy thing. Nothing we did was illegal," Royer told Kwon in April, according to the phone transcript presented in court.
Royer went on to scoff at a charge that he believed prosecutors were considering -- violating the neutrality law. "You know it [carries] a maximum of 70 days in jail. I mean some kind of garbage like that," Royer said.
But Royer was mistaken. The neutrality act, which was enacted at the turn of the 20th century to stop American mercenaries from dragging the United States into wars, carries a penalty of up to three years. More importantly, prosecutors also have charged the men with numerous weapons violations for allegedly planning to use their guns in support of Lashkar. That could make any potential sentence grow exponentially.
Three years ago, when he regaled his friends with tales of Kashmir, Royer had no idea the journey could lead him to a U.S. jail cell, he said. If found guilty on all charges, he would face a minimum sentence of 155 years.
Researcher Margot Williams contributed to this report.
© 2003 The Washington Post Company
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