By Josh Meyer
Los Angeles Times
CHARLIEVILLE, Trinidad and Tobago – Five years ago, as 19 al-Qaida operatives in the United States put the finishing touches on what would become the Sept. 11 attacks, a frail, asthmatic computer engineer from South Florida paid a visit to this tiny Muslim enclave where he’d lived as a boy.
Adnan Gulshair Muhammad el Shukrijumah, then 25, kept a low profile over the course of the week. He hung out with a small circle of devout older men who were leaders of the local Islamic community. They prayed in mosques, went fishing and enjoyed long walks and leisurely dinners, recalled one of the hosts, Imtiaz Mohammed.
Shukrijumah spoke fondly of his father, an influential Islamic scholar and Charlieville community leader two decades earlier. He also spoke of his family life in Miramar, Fla., his computer technician business and his travels to the Mideast and other exotic locales.
But Shukrijumah said nothing about why he was in Trinidad, nor what his plans were, acquaintances here say.
Two years later, the FBI put out an urgent all-points bulletin for Shukrijumah, depicting him as one of al-Qaida’s most well-trained, intelligent and deadly operatives. He was described as the ultimate “sleeper agent,” intent on attacking the United States, possibly with weapons of mass destruction.
Law enforcement officials and terrorism experts now believe Shukrijumah is one of a handful of young, street-smart leaders of al-Qaida handpicked by Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, to keep the terrorist network alive and humming in the face of U.S.-led efforts to unravel it.
To be sure, the FBI’s record on identifying terrorist plotters since Sept. 11 includes some widely publicized failures. In some cases, law enforcement officials have alleged that suspects were centrally involved in plots, only to back off those assertions when cases moved toward court.
And officials concede there is much they do not know about Shukrijumah, including what he was doing in Trinidad. Within days of the alert in March 2003, agents arrived on the island looking for him, but he was long gone.
Terrorism officials inside and outside the government say they believe Shukrijumah is a major al-Qaida figure, and the hunt for him is intense, with an FBI team tracking him virtually full time. So far, their quarry has remained elusive.
Whereas the core of al-Qaida’s followers are young, poor and relatively uneducated, Shukrijumah has been to college and is comfortable with technology. He’s also a naturalized U.S. citizen whose appearance would allow him to pass as Hispanic, Indian or Mideastern and who speaks English with no discernible accent, officials say.
That background makes Shukrijumah especially threatening, counterterrorism authorities say. He is dangerous “because he is so trusted in the organization and because he has traveled in the Western world and is familiar with its customs and procedures,” said Joseph Billy Jr., assistant FBI director for counter-terrorism.
Part of al-Qaida Stage 2
Shukrijumah, said Sajjan Gohel, director for international security at the London-based Asia-Pacific Foundation, is believed to be “the guy who was reared to replace (Mohammed),” as an al-Qaida senior trainer, facilitator and propagandist, playing a central role in the development of hundreds of the network’s future soldiers. “He is part of al-Qaida Stage 2,” Gohel said. His foundation consults on terrorism assessment for governments.
Shukrijumah has not been charged with a crime, but federal grand juries in Virginia and South Florida are hearing evidence about his activities.
Agents working on the investigation were reluctant to provide many details because of those probes, but the FBI does say that Shukrijumah trained at an al-Qaida camp in Afghanistan before Sept. 11. There, he learned to handle AK-47s, M-16s, Uzis and other automatic weapons and studied topography, communications, camouflage, clandestine surveillance and explosives, including C-4 plastic charges, dynamite and mines, they say.
The FBI believes Shukrijumah used that training to fight for the Taliban in Afghanistan.
Investigators also believe he was present at a meeting of al-Qaida leaders in March 2004 near the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, where attendees appear to have discussed upcoming terrorist operations in Europe and the United States.
But much of Shukrijumah’s life remains a mystery. And trying to find him has been a maze of false leads and vague glimmers.
The hunt for Adnan Shukrijumah began with a mysterious character called “the South American.”
A year after the Sept. 11 attacks, interrogators desperately were trying to determine what other plots might be in the works, and where.
While questioning an al-Qaida detainee in Pakistan, they got an intriguing lead. An operative known only as “the South American” had been discussing with al-Qaida leaders new ways of attacking U.S. citizens, including blowing up apartment buildings with natural gas and spraying people with cyanide in nightclubs, the prisoner said.
Authorities knew little about this person except that he was well trained by al-Qaida, connected to its top leadership and on the loose, perhaps plotting an attack on U.S. soil.
And their anxiety was growing. By early 2003, detainees held overseas and at the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, were telling interrogators that al-Qaida leaders had sent new terrorist operatives into the United States to launch follow-up attacks.
Unlike the Sept. 11 hijackers, the detainees said, these new teams included second-generation immigrant Muslims who had lived in the U.S., understood its customs and could operate under the radar of law enforcement.
When asked which operative was most likely to launch a U.S.-based attack, many captives mentioned one particular figure with an almost mythical reputation as a ruthless jihadist. His nom de guerre was Jaffar al Tayyar, a reference to an Islamic hero who had fought beside the prophet Muhammad.
But his identity, too, was a mystery.
Foreign-born, U.S.-educated
The pieces began to come together in early March when Mohammed was captured in Pakistan and his computers, phones and other electronic gear were seized.
The evidence confirmed that Mohammed had been sending “Westernized” al-Qaida soldiers on missions into the U.S. and other countries.
And when Mohammed was shown a photograph of Shukrijumah, he identified him as Tayyar, U.S. counterterrorism officials said.
By then, U.S. authorities were concluding that Shukrijumah was also the shadowy South American, an apparent reference to his time spent in Trinidad and nearby Guyana.
To their dismay, they realized that one of al-Qaida’s best-trained operatives had been lurking – and perhaps plotting – in the United States since long before the Sept. 11 attacks.
Adnan Gulshair Muhammad el Shukrijumah was born in June 1975 in either Saudi Arabia or Guyana. After his family moved from New York to Florida, he attended Broward Community College, where he excelled in chemistry, biology and computers, according to the FBI.
He also suffered from asthma, which required him to use an inhaler, his mother said in a recent interview. As a result, he often remained indoors, she said, tending to his studies, his computer business and his scholarly work.
Sometime in the late 1990s, Shukrijumah started leaning toward more radical Islamist views, authorities say. The FBI believes he was inspired by a group of Muslim men in South Florida who gave him books and videotapes about jihad in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kashmir and Afghanistan.
In late 1999, Shukrijumah began traveling to Pakistan and Afghanistan. To get into an al-Qaida training camp, he needed a sponsor. The FBI says Shukrijumah found one in Ismael Faiz of Lahore, Pakistan. U.S. officials believe Faiz is a member of al-Qaida and the Pakistani militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba, which has been connected to recent alleged terrorist plots in Canada and London.
After he started traveling to Pakistan and Afghanistan Shukrijumah began to change, say friends and associates interviewed by the FBI. He would take off for long periods, to places overseas he would not discuss.
“Every time he came back, he was a different person,” the FBI official said. “He was more calm, more cool and more purposeful in his actions.”
By 2001, the FBI was investigating Shukrijumah in connection with two suspected terrorist plots, one of which involved a group of militants who apparently were using South Florida as a base from which to recruit jihadists and finance attacks and assassinations in the Mideast.
But agents were never able to connect him to either plot. They later came to believe that he deliberately had been keeping his distance because, as one agent put it, “it was felt in the (al-Qaida) community that he was in for bigger and better things.”
After the Sept. 11 attacks, federal agents swarmed South Florida looking for clues and connections they might have missed. As many as 15 of the hijackers had spent their last months there, training for and planning the suicide mission.
The FBI ultimately took several of Shukrijumah’s acquaintances into custody on terrorism or immigration charges.
Agents also went looking for Shukrijumah. But by then, he was gone and had left few clues.
Chasing through cyberspace
When Shukrijumah re-emerged in the FBI’s consciousness in March 2003, Pasquale “Pat” D’Amuro, then the FBI’s senior counterterrorism official and a veteran al-Qaida tracker, felt an acute sense of dread.
“We thought he was a grave danger to the security of the United States,” D’Amuro recalled recently. “We thought he could be anywhere.”
On March 20, 2003, the same day the U.S. began bombing Iraq, the FBI went public. With TV news crews on their heels, more than 50 federal agents and local police descended on Shukrijumah’s neighborhood.
Armed with a warrant for his arrest as a material witness, FBI agents knocked on doors, showing photographs and asking whether he had been seen in Florida recently.
They scoured his mail, credit cards, bank records and phone bills.
By then, however, Shukrijumah had been away from his family home for almost two years. In the months before Sept. 11, he had traveled widely through the United States and Canada, scouting potential terrorist targets, say FBI officials, who believe he spent about a week each in New York, Washington, D.C., Chicago and Montreal.
Since the attacks, her son had called just once, to check in, Zuhrah Abdu Ahmed told the agents.
Ahmed, now a widow, conceded that it was possible her son might have fallen in with the wrong crowd.
“I recognize a lot of people do evil stuff in the name of the religion,” she said, and then paused. “He’s a young guy. Maybe they try to trap him, without he even knew what was going on around him. Who knows?”
The FBI also began chasing Shukrijumah through the back alleys of cyberspace. Within hours of the FBI’s public announcement, Shukrijumah might have given them a lead.
Just after midnight that day, an e-mail popped up in the guestbook section of MasterArabic.com, a Web site Shukrijumah had set up to promote his father’s Arabic tutoring business and Islamic teachings. Routed to obscure the identity of the sender, the message said only, “I am safe.”
Meanwhile, Shukrijumah continues to cause many a sleepless night.
Special Agent Andrew Lenzen, the lead case agent and a veteran of the FBI’s Miami counterterrorism squad, has amassed an encyclopedic knowledge of Shukrijumah’s actions and personality quirks. He has even compiled a timeline of his life, beginning with the day he was born.
“I know him almost like his mother,” said Lenzen. “I’ve lived, slept and dreamed him for the past three years.”
While this is not confirmed there is an active investigation ongoing. More sources on this story along with pictures of Shukrijumah here;
http://riehlworldview.com/carnivorous_conservative/2006/09/alqaeda_and_the.html
http://hotair.com/archives/2006/09/12/report-al-qaeda-planning-nuke-attack-for-ramadan
Note: some embedded links are no longer available due to the age of this article.
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