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A North Carolina Qaeda Cell?
A North Carolina Qaeda Cell?
One of Osama bin Laden’s most trusted lieutenants was once a student in the Tarheel State. Now local Muslims fear their community is being targeted for special investigation
By Joseph Contreras and Ed Caram
NEWSWEEK WEB EXCLUSIVE
Dec. 20 — Are the Feds taking a special interest in the Islamic community of Greensboro, N.C., and environs? It sure seems that way to some prominent Muslims living in the state’s so-called Triad area.
IN SEPTEMBER, federal agents arrested a 30-year-old Sudanese taxi driver named Mekki Hamed Mekki on immigration violations in Greensboro. A former airline pilot for Sudan’s national carrier, Mekki yesterday pleaded guilty to three minor immigration infractions in a Winston-Salem, N.C., federal district court, and the plea bargain deal was immediately sealed on the presiding judge’s orders.
Last month federal authorities also arrested a 36-year-old Moroccan national named Abel-Ilah Elmardoudi at the Greyhound bus terminal in Greensboro. Elmardoudi was said to be passing through town while en route to the Houston area, and within days of his arrest he was extradited to Detroit to face charges of falsifying immigration documents and providing material support to terrorist organizations along with three other men. Elmardoudi has pleaded not guilty to the charges.
It may be purely coincidental, but NEWSWEEK has learned that a former member of Greensboro’s Muslim community is one of bin Laden’s most trusted and dangerous lieutenants. Khaled Shaikh Mohammad has been described by U.S. officials as a principal architect of the September 11 attacks in New York and Washington, and prior to joining the ranks of Al Qaeda he spent nearly four years as an engineering student at two North Carolina schools in the mid-1980s. The Kuwaiti-born Mohammad enrolled at Chowan College 100 miles northeast of the state capital of Raleigh in the spring of 1984 and then transferred to North Carolina A&T State University in Greensboro later that same year to pursue his studies. Now 37, Mohammad received a Bachelor of Science degree in mechanical engineering from A&T at the end of 1986.
It didn’t take long for the twentysomething graduate to plunge into terrorist activities, say U.S. officials. By the early 1990s, Mohammad was living in Manila with a nephew named Ramzi Yousef and cutting a strange figure as a cell-phone-toting playboy going by the name of Abdul Majid. The Feds allege that the two men played key roles in planning the 1993 World Trade Center bombing in lower Manhattan and later hatched a plot in 1995 to blow up a dozen U.S. commercial jetliners in the skies over the Pacific. That latter project went awry when some of their colleagues accidentally blew up the Manila apartment where they were mixing explosives. Yousef was arrested by Filipino authorities and is now serving a life sentence in a U.S. prison. Mohammad eluded capture, however, and remains at large, one of the world’s most wanted men with a $25 million U.S. State Department reward on his head.
If Mohammad’s North Carolina interlude has led investigators to focus special attention on the Triad region that encompasses Winston-Salem, High Point and Greensboro, the Feds aren’t saying. Don Causey, the head of the local FBI office, has acknowledged contacting people in the community “to discuss issues germane to the Middle East” that include terrorism-related matters, but he won’t comment on whom they speak with and for what specific reasons. One area Muslim who says he was recently visited by FBI agents accuses the bureau of unfairly targeting the Triad’s 10,000-strong Islamic community as a supposed “rallying point for Muslim opposition to the repressive policies of the U.S. administration.” ”[We] are easy scapegoats for all these problems,” says Badi Ali, the Palestinian president of a Greensboro mosque called The Islamic Center of the Triad. “We are becoming the usual suspects in all searches, and I feel like we are living in a Third World country where the secret police can interrogate and arrest us and build a case based on secret evidence.”
That said, there is yet another North Carolina connection to the murky world of Islamic extremism. According to U.S. officials, Abdul Hakim Ali Hashim Murad, a Kuwaiti-born childhood friend of Khaled Mohammad’s imprisoned nephew Ramzi Yousef, took flying lessons at the now defunct Coastal Aviation school in New Bern, N.C., in the early 1990s. Coastal Aviation specialized in offering accelerated training to pilots seeking multiengine and instrument ratings for commercial flights, says its former owner Paul Proctor. Murad was arrested in the Philippines in 1995 along with Yousef and later convicted in a New York court of conspiring to sabotage the U.S. airliners plying Pacific Ocean routes. Murad is also behind bars in an undisclosed federal penitentiary.
Khaled Mohammad doesn’t seem to have left much of an impression on his professors during his stint at North Carolina A&T, a onetime land-grant college established for black students at the height of Jim Crow segregation in 1891. None of eight members of the mechanical-engineering faculty from that era who were contacted by NEWSWEEK remember him, no picture appears in the university’s student yearbooks and the only mention of Mohammad is contained in the May 1987 list of B.Sc. graduates from his department.
According to Guilford County police records in Greensboro, Mohammad was involved in a traffic accident in August 1984 that led to his conviction on charges of failing to reduce his speed and a civil-suit judgment ordering him to pay more than $10,000 in damages to the motorist and a passenger riding in the vehicle he crashed into. Mohammad never paid out the money, his driving license was suspended and in January 1986 Mohammad was stopped by police and subsequently convicted of driving without a valid license. He also incurred a speeding infraction in nearby Burke County around that time. By the end of 1986, Mohammad had completed his course work and seems to have left North Carolina shortly thereafter—apparently never to resurface again on any government agency’s radar screen inside the Tarheel State.
© 2003 Newsweek, Inc.
One of Osama bin Laden’s most trusted lieutenants was once a student in the Tarheel State. Now local Muslims fear their community is being targeted for special investigation
By Joseph Contreras and Ed Caram
NEWSWEEK WEB EXCLUSIVE
Dec. 20 — Are the Feds taking a special interest in the Islamic community of Greensboro, N.C., and environs? It sure seems that way to some prominent Muslims living in the state’s so-called Triad area.
IN SEPTEMBER, federal agents arrested a 30-year-old Sudanese taxi driver named Mekki Hamed Mekki on immigration violations in Greensboro. A former airline pilot for Sudan’s national carrier, Mekki yesterday pleaded guilty to three minor immigration infractions in a Winston-Salem, N.C., federal district court, and the plea bargain deal was immediately sealed on the presiding judge’s orders.
Last month federal authorities also arrested a 36-year-old Moroccan national named Abel-Ilah Elmardoudi at the Greyhound bus terminal in Greensboro. Elmardoudi was said to be passing through town while en route to the Houston area, and within days of his arrest he was extradited to Detroit to face charges of falsifying immigration documents and providing material support to terrorist organizations along with three other men. Elmardoudi has pleaded not guilty to the charges.
It may be purely coincidental, but NEWSWEEK has learned that a former member of Greensboro’s Muslim community is one of bin Laden’s most trusted and dangerous lieutenants. Khaled Shaikh Mohammad has been described by U.S. officials as a principal architect of the September 11 attacks in New York and Washington, and prior to joining the ranks of Al Qaeda he spent nearly four years as an engineering student at two North Carolina schools in the mid-1980s. The Kuwaiti-born Mohammad enrolled at Chowan College 100 miles northeast of the state capital of Raleigh in the spring of 1984 and then transferred to North Carolina A&T State University in Greensboro later that same year to pursue his studies. Now 37, Mohammad received a Bachelor of Science degree in mechanical engineering from A&T at the end of 1986.
It didn’t take long for the twentysomething graduate to plunge into terrorist activities, say U.S. officials. By the early 1990s, Mohammad was living in Manila with a nephew named Ramzi Yousef and cutting a strange figure as a cell-phone-toting playboy going by the name of Abdul Majid. The Feds allege that the two men played key roles in planning the 1993 World Trade Center bombing in lower Manhattan and later hatched a plot in 1995 to blow up a dozen U.S. commercial jetliners in the skies over the Pacific. That latter project went awry when some of their colleagues accidentally blew up the Manila apartment where they were mixing explosives. Yousef was arrested by Filipino authorities and is now serving a life sentence in a U.S. prison. Mohammad eluded capture, however, and remains at large, one of the world’s most wanted men with a $25 million U.S. State Department reward on his head.
If Mohammad’s North Carolina interlude has led investigators to focus special attention on the Triad region that encompasses Winston-Salem, High Point and Greensboro, the Feds aren’t saying. Don Causey, the head of the local FBI office, has acknowledged contacting people in the community “to discuss issues germane to the Middle East” that include terrorism-related matters, but he won’t comment on whom they speak with and for what specific reasons. One area Muslim who says he was recently visited by FBI agents accuses the bureau of unfairly targeting the Triad’s 10,000-strong Islamic community as a supposed “rallying point for Muslim opposition to the repressive policies of the U.S. administration.” ”[We] are easy scapegoats for all these problems,” says Badi Ali, the Palestinian president of a Greensboro mosque called The Islamic Center of the Triad. “We are becoming the usual suspects in all searches, and I feel like we are living in a Third World country where the secret police can interrogate and arrest us and build a case based on secret evidence.”
That said, there is yet another North Carolina connection to the murky world of Islamic extremism. According to U.S. officials, Abdul Hakim Ali Hashim Murad, a Kuwaiti-born childhood friend of Khaled Mohammad’s imprisoned nephew Ramzi Yousef, took flying lessons at the now defunct Coastal Aviation school in New Bern, N.C., in the early 1990s. Coastal Aviation specialized in offering accelerated training to pilots seeking multiengine and instrument ratings for commercial flights, says its former owner Paul Proctor. Murad was arrested in the Philippines in 1995 along with Yousef and later convicted in a New York court of conspiring to sabotage the U.S. airliners plying Pacific Ocean routes. Murad is also behind bars in an undisclosed federal penitentiary.
Khaled Mohammad doesn’t seem to have left much of an impression on his professors during his stint at North Carolina A&T, a onetime land-grant college established for black students at the height of Jim Crow segregation in 1891. None of eight members of the mechanical-engineering faculty from that era who were contacted by NEWSWEEK remember him, no picture appears in the university’s student yearbooks and the only mention of Mohammad is contained in the May 1987 list of B.Sc. graduates from his department.
According to Guilford County police records in Greensboro, Mohammad was involved in a traffic accident in August 1984 that led to his conviction on charges of failing to reduce his speed and a civil-suit judgment ordering him to pay more than $10,000 in damages to the motorist and a passenger riding in the vehicle he crashed into. Mohammad never paid out the money, his driving license was suspended and in January 1986 Mohammad was stopped by police and subsequently convicted of driving without a valid license. He also incurred a speeding infraction in nearby Burke County around that time. By the end of 1986, Mohammad had completed his course work and seems to have left North Carolina shortly thereafter—apparently never to resurface again on any government agency’s radar screen inside the Tarheel State.
© 2003 Newsweek, Inc.