The FBI continued its global manhunt yesterday for suspected terrorist Adnan G. El Shukrijumah, focusing in part on South Florida, where bureau officials met this week with members of the Arab-American community to seek assistance in the search.

El Shukrijumah, 27, is the target of a worldwide alert issued last week by the FBI, who said the Saudi national posed a serious threat to the United States and could be plotting new suicide attacks against targets here and abroad. He was last seen in late 2001 in the Miami area.

3/24/2003 Man labeled terror suspect by FBI visited Trinidad in 2001, officials say

By MICHAEL SMITH, Associated Press Writer PORT-OF-SPAIN, Trinidad - A Saudi-born man wanted by the FBI for allegedly plotting terrorist acts traveled to Trinidad in 2001 and said he was visiting a friend, officials said Monday.
The suspect, Adnan G. El Shukrijumah, used a Guyana passport issued in the United States to enter Trinidad and Tobago, said Malcolm O'Brien, of the Caribbean country's Immigration Division.
He arrived May 17, 2001, apparently on a flight from Guyana, he said. The authorities have yet to confirm when El Shukrijumah left or where he was headed, but he wrote on his immigration form that he was visiting a friend and staying six days.
The FBI issued an alert last week asking law enforcement agencies and the public to watch for the 27-year-old El Shukrijumah, saying he is suspected of being part of al-Qaida terrorist network.
U.S. authorities say they are working to establish links between El Shukrijumah and other terror suspects including alleged "dirty bomb" plotter Jose Padilla. El Shukrijumah "has been identified by senior members of the al-Qaida organization as a very, very, very serious threat to the United States' interests, both here and abroad," said Hector Pesquera, head of the FBI's south Florida office.
U.S. officials have said El Shukrijumah lived in south Florida in the 1990s at the same time as Padilla, an American arrested last year for allegedly plotting to detonate a radioactive bomb.
El Shukrijumah, 27, was once a legal U.S. resident. But the authorities are still researching his immigration status and say he may be using passports from Guyana, Saudi Arabia, Canada or Trinidad. His 73-year-old father, Gulshair, lives in Miramar, Florida, and has said his son is not a terrorist. The father said when they last spoke five months ago, his son was teaching English in Morocco.
The younger El Shukrijumah traveled on a Guyana passport because his father was born there, relatives in the South American country said.
On his last visit to Guyana three years ago, the younger El Shukrijumah lost that passport, said Bibi Juman, wife of the man's cousin, Marzab Juman. "As far as we know, he lost the passport somewhere between the airport when he came here around 2000 and the hotel at which he stayed," she said.
He left Guyana on an emergency travel document, she said. It was the first time the Guyana family had seen him in at least 20 years, and he told them he was headed for Trinidad.
The Juman family said they recognized El Shukrijumah's picture on television but that they knew him as Adnan Juman. The FBI says El Shukrijumah has used many aliases.
Officials in Trinidad said they were working to determine whether he might still be in the country. El Shukrijumah's family lived in Trinidad during the 1980s while Adnan's father taught at several mosques, said Munaf Mohammed, an imam at a mosque in central Trinidad.
Mohammed said Adnan El Shukrijumah was a young boy when he knew him, and he described the elder El Shukrijumah as "a very nice, peaceful, quiet man." Mohammed said he has rarely spoken to the family since they left Trinidad for the United States about 1990.

Wanted Man is Holy Says Relatives, Georgetown, Guyana, March 23: Ask for Adnan El'Shukri-Jumah on the East Bank of the Demarara River, and you'll get puzzled looks, even from family. But ask for Adnan Juman, and they remember him as the son of a highly respected preacher who left Guyana's sleepy farmland in the 1970s to study Islam in Medina and eventually become a missionary.

Out of the deep regard for El'Shukri-Jumah's father, Gulshair El'Shukri-Jumah of Miramar, cousins who hadn't seen El'Shukri-Jumah since he was 3 opened their home to him two years ago for a few days during Ramadan after a friend told them he was in town. It didn't seem right for the son of such a holy man to stay in a hotel, said Marzab Juman, a cousin. ....

"He never spoke bad about anything," said Marsab Juman, another cousin. "He always had a Quran in his hand."

The East Bank road that runs near the Juman home is dotted with green and white mosques, many of which El'Shukri-Jumah visited two years ago. Out of respect for his father, the first South American Muslim to graduate from the university at Medina, El'Shukri-Jumah was often asked to read prayers.

Although El'Shukri-Jumah was born to a Saudi mother in Saudi Arabia, he retains Guyanese citizenship, his cousins said, and when they saw him he was traveling on a Guyanese passport.

Saudi citizenship is conferred through the father, and since Adnan's father is Guyanese, so are his children, they explained.

"I don't think what's going on, he has any connection with those things," Marsab Juman added. "I think it's a mistake with names." [excerpt]

I don't know whether it's the war, or just laziness, but none of the national media seems to putting this guy together with his father, who was involved with one of the perps in the 1995 "Day of Terror" NYC bombing plot in which the "Blind Sheikh" and Ramsey Yousef were also involved. And although the national media continues to link him to Padilla, he is more closely linked to the two Muslims who were tried and convicted in South Florida last year for plotting to blow up power stations.

There's a family lineage of terror associations here -- why weren't this guy and his father under surveillance after 9/11?

Mosque fires father of suspect

By Tanya Weinberg
Staff Writer

South Florida Sun-Sentinel

March 26, 2003

His son, branded a terror suspect and the subject of a worldwide FBI search, has disappeared. Now a respected Islamic holy man's position at a Miramar mosque is gone, too.

"They fired me," Gulshair El'Shukri-Jumah said Tuesday. "I can't sleep at night anymore."

Mosque leaders say they do not suspect El'Shukri-Jumah, 73, of terrorism. But they say their community is nervous about publicity over federal investigators accusing his 27-year-old son, Adnan El'Shukri-Jumah of possibly coordinating al-Qaida's next attack against America.

"In light of what happened he was asked to step down," said board member Abzal Hosein. "We want to let people know at no time we have any affiliation with terrorists."

As Gulshair El'Shukri-Jumah nervously awaited a follow-up meeting with mosque directors Tuesday, he retraced elements of his religious career, which included 20 years of missionary work for the Saudi government. In 1995 he retired after 10 years leading a Brooklyn mosque where at least one suspect from the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993 prayed.

El'Shukri-Jumah said he testified in a trial in which Abdul Rasheed was convicted of plotting to blow up the United Nations and the Holland Tunnel.

El'Shukri-Jumah said he understood that Rasheed, prosecuted under his legal name of Clement Hampton-El, had fought in Afghanistan to "help his brothers, the Muslims."

>>>snip<<<

Gulshair says the board asked him to serve as imam, or spiritual leader, three years ago. He took two months to decide, uncomfortable with the idea that the leadership would want him to promote Trinidad. He is a Guyanese native more interested in spreading Islam.

Most of Al-Hijrah's 100 to 200 congregants are Trinidadian, members said. A group of nine or 10 Trinidadian friends founded of the Caribbean American Islamic Association about a decade ago, said Hosein. A few years ago they bought a building next to the El'Shukri-Jumah home.

"After getting to know him and the experience and knowledge he had of Islam, we didn't want that to go to waste. And what was more important, he was living next door."

The FBI has said that during a meeting at the Miramar mosque that a young convicted terror plotter, Imran Mandhai, tried to recruit Adnan El'Shukri-Jumah to a scheme to induce anarchy by blowing up a Florida power plant. Federal authorities said El'Shukri-Jumah refused, guessing correctly that he was being monitored by an FBI informant.

Gulshair El'Shukri-Jumah said he does not think the meeting took place at the mosque, but Hosein said FBI investigators must know what they are talking about.

Continued here

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.