It was after the “extremely virulent” anthrax was found in Kandahar that, a few days before Christmas 2003, the country returned to “orange” temporarily and brought in the New Year under high alert. Then, in late February 2004, Zawahiri promised another attack on the homeland was coming. This, perhaps overblown (perhaps not) threat was embodied in the dimunitive Adnan G. El-Shukrijumah aka Jafar the Pilot. Jafar the Pilot’s father was the mentor of Ali Al-Timimi’s mentor, Bilal Philips.
Adnan G. El-Shukrijumah was born on August 4, 1975, in Medina, Saudi Arabia to a 16-year-old mother and a 44-year-old Islamic scholar who had headed a mosque in Brooklyn. El-Shukrijumah’s father once translated for the blind sheik. His father, Gilshair, testified as a character witness at a trial of defendants charged with conspiring to blow up New York City landmarks in 1995. He appeared on behalf of Clement Hampton El, who was convicted of plotting to blow up the Holland tunnel and the United Nations. He was the mentor of Bilal Philips who in turn was the mentor of GWU microbiology grad student of Ali Timimi. Adnan’s father had been sent to the Caribbean country of Trinidad and Tobago by the Saudi government as an Islamic missionary. The family lived there until 1983. When his father was transferred to New York City to lead a Brooklyn mosque, the family returned to Saudi Arabia.
Brooklyn had long been important to the infrastructure in the US for obtaining jihadi recruits. Established in the mid-1980s, the Al-Kifah (or Struggle) Refugee Center in New York originally recruited and raised funds for Mujahedeen headed for Afghanistan. In Peshawar, the organization was headed by Mohammed Islambouli, the brother of Anwar Sadat’s assissin. In 1993, the group announced it was switching its operations to Bosnia. These “mujahideen” recruitment centers spread throughout the USA, to places such as Portland, Oregon, which opened a branch in October 1994 — and to Boston where Aafia Siddiqui attended Brandeis and MIT. In the mid-1990s, KSM and Islambouli were given safe haven in Doha, Qatar by the religious minister there. Mohammed Islambouli and his plan to attack using the aircraft and other means was the subject of a December 4, 1998 Presidential Daily Brief that the CIA provided President Clinton.
In 1995, after Adnan had graduated from high school, his father retired from his missionary job as Imam in Brooklyn and the family to Florida, moving the family to Miramar in 1996. The modest retirement home was next door to a small mosque at which the father would preach. For the next two years, Adnan studied computer engineering at Broward Community College, though he did not get a degree. Imam at the mosque next door to his house, Adnan’s Dad often taught at other mosques. One of the mosques he and Adnan would frequent was in Fort Lauderdale — the one across from Franklin Park. It was there that Adnan met Jose Padilla, the ‘’enemy combatant’’ charged in connection with a plot to explode a radioactive bomb in the United States and arrested en route to meet Adham Hassoun, another worshiper at the mosque.
The former imam of that mosque, Awad, confirms El-Shukrijumah and Padilla knew each other. Adnan’s father counseled Padilla’s wife when he left to go to Egypt and she sought a divorce. (When the Padillas were divorced in 2001 Jose Padilla gave an address in Egypt.)
Adnan was responsible at a young age, with his father absent in Brooklyn. The family acknowledges that Adnan had a quick temper. In 1999, Adnan held garage sales and car washes to raise money for Muslim refugees of the war in Bosnia. The fundraising supported Global Relief Fund, which the government has alleged funded terrorist organizations. In May 2001, he went to Saudi Arabia via Trinidad and Panama to sell Islamic goods and trinkets. He didn’t like the permissiveness of American society — he objected to scantily clad women. He wanted to get married. He allegedly was at one or more meetings in the Summer of 2001 in Pakistan at which KSM and Sufaat were present. After 9/11, the FBI began visiting the family home. His mother told him to stay away and not come home. ‘’I tell him we don’t want to know where he is.’’ She said the last she knew he was teaching English in Morocco and had gotten married.
Adnan El Shukrijumah holds a green card but did not become a U.S. citizen. He is still a citizen of Guyana. Saudi Arabia is quite emphatic that he is not a citizen of Saudi Arabia. Officials say he uses a half-dozen aliases and passports, from such countries as Canada, Trinidad and Saudi Arabia.
Not only is he an alleged associate of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed but of Ramzi Binalshibh, another key 9/11 plotter. George Tenet, former CIA Director, noted that Ramzi Yousef had a CBRN role. Apparently, Adnan Shukrijumah accompanied Mohammed Atta and another hijacker in visiting an INS office in Miami in May 2001. The INS employee is 75% sure it was him, having commented to a colleague at the time at how good looking the fellow was.
The Special Branch Trinidad & Tobago Police said they have records that El Shukrijumah was in Trinidad in 2001 and 2002 into 2003. The Express was told: “We have records on him coming and leaving including the fact that he left on a BWIA flight for London in 2001 but on the last occasion he was here we only have records on him coming to Trinidad but none of him leaving.” El Shukrijumah has been associated with the Darul-Uloom Institute, an Islamic institute in Central Trinidad. Part of the problem is that El Shukrijumah has several passports including a Trinidad and Tobago passport and has in the past used several aliases to escape law enforcement agencies. He is known to have Guyanese links. The US authorities also report that he may have been in Canada in 2002 looking for nuclear material for a “dirty bomb.”
US officials found a letter advising Egyptian El-Maati that he had been granted Canadian citizenship and a patient’s card from Toronto General Hospital. His brother, Ahmad Abu-Elmaati, in a written confession, that he now has recanted, described a plan to drive a truck bomb into the Parliament buildings in Ottawa.
In late May 2004, Jafar allegedly was spotted a Tegucigalpa Internet cafe. According to Honduras security official, he made phone calls to France and the United States. The witness, the owner of the cafe, says he was with two other men, “all badly dressed and bearded,” who spoke English and French. Security Minister Oscar Alvarez claimed Shukrijumah was involved in a plot to disrupt shipping in the Panama Canal.
On September 29, 2001, Dr. Alibek — just a matter of feet from the microbiologist working with Bin Laden’s sheik and known to be a Salafist hardliner — was interviewed on the threat of anthrax. Dr. Osterholm, an expert at the University of Minnesota addressed the threat of aerial spraying. (He and his colleagues were a couple miles from where Zacarias Moussaoui in August was found with cropdusting documents on his laptop.)
Might relatively costless, biosecurity precautions served to avoid the need for $50 billion that then was spent to address the threat?
“Mr. ALIBEK: When we talk and deal with, for example, nuclear weapons, it’s not really difficult to count how much of one or another substance we’ve got in the hands. When you talk about biological agents, in this case it’s absolutely impossible to say whether or not something has been stolen.”
ZWERDLING: Alibek and other researchers say they don’t have evidence that scientists actually did steal deadly germs and sell them to terrorists. But when they look at other countries that have produced bio-warfare agents and look at their possible connections to terrorists, it makes them nervous, such as Iraq, Iran, Egypt and North Korea. And forget secret deals. Terrorists might be able to buy some biological warfare agents on the open market.
Until a few years ago, for instance, researchers could order tiny amounts of anthrax through the mail from at least one commercial lab right here in the United States [from American Type Culture Collection, which by 2001 was located partly in George Mason University’s Discovery Hall along with an adjacent building; ATCC co-sponsored Ali’s bioinformatics program and he had access to the ATCC facilities]. The US government has cracked down on that trade, but bio-weapon specialists say people can still buy anthrax from companies in other countries. So let’s suppose that a group of terrorists could get a sample of virulent anthrax***”
Next question: Could they keep those microbes alive and grow enough of them so they could launch a major biological attack? Alibek says it’s not easy. The terrorists would have to maintain all kinds of precise conditions in a laboratory—oxygen levels, the right nutrients. And that means they’d have to hire renegade scientists who know how to do it, or they’d have to learn themselves.
Mr. ALIBEK: Biological weapons—it’s not rocket science. And people with knowledge, more or less sophisticated, they’re able to develop, manufacture and deploy biological weapons.
***
ZWERDLING: Osterholm studies bio-terrorism and public health at the University of Minnesota. He’s worried about new aerosol products which researchers have developed for factories and hospitals. He says unfortunately those inventions are also perfect for spreading diseases.
Mr. OSTERHOLM: Next time you go through a department store and you come near the perfume section, you know how you can smell that for aisles away. Well, that’s a very simplistic model for what an aerosol particle technology device does. Hardly that little spray bottle is a sophisticated weapon, yet we know that with what kinds of things we’ve developed today, you can have devices that can, in fact, take large buildings and fill them with these kinds of sprays that would have infectious disease agents in them.
ZWERDLING: Osterholm says if terrorists use these sprays to spread anthrax, they could potentially kill thousands of people. Anthrax isn’t contagious, but anybody who’s on the site and breathes the germs could get infected.
— “Possibility of bio-terrorism,” National Public Radio, September 29, 2001