Wednesday, October 12, 2005

Jihadists On Country Lanes?

According to Baron Bodissey at Gates of Vienna :
Jamaat ul-Fuqra in Virginia, Part 1

"During the Beltway Sniper crisis, back in the fall of 2002, a series of articles in The Washington Times described John Allen Muhammad’s conversion to Islam, and his later break with the Nation of Islam (the articles are no longer available, but extracts have been preserved here). Apparently the NOI was not militant enough for Mr. Muhammad, and he left it to become involved with a group called Jamaat ul-Fuqra (Arabic for “community of the impoverished”), a terrorist organization....

"The group was founded in New York by Sheikh Gilani in New York in 1980. Its current headquarters is in Hancock, New York, and it has various compounds, or Jamaats, scattered throughout the United States and Canada, notably in Colorado, New York, Tennessee, Georgia, and Virginia. Most of the adherents are reported to be American-born Black Muslims who follow a strict Islamist ideology.

"Sheikh Gilani, you may remember, is the cleric with whom Daniel Pearl had arranged an interview back in January of 2002. Unfortunately, Mr. Pearl was betrayed by his sources, and then abducted and beheaded. Sheikh Gilani was arrested later that month and languishes in Pakistani custody...."
The article goes on to mention the organization's numerous jihad operations in North America in the 1980's and 1990's, involvement in the planning of the 1993 WTC bombing (Clement Rodney Hampton-el, convicted for connections to the 1993 WTC, was a member of Jamaat al-Fuqra), and possible connections to Richard Reid of shoe-bomber notoriety. Also of note here is that Jamaat al-Fuqra is active within the prisons of various states.

Read the entire article, complete with photos, here. As the Baron has entitled his article "Part I," we can probably look forward to at least one update.

No comments: