Mazen al-Najjar
Posted on 02/27/2003 4:15:56 AM PST by JohnHuang2
WASHINGTON – The brother-in-law of alleged terrorist co-conspirator Sami al-Arian attended engineering classes at the same college and time as the suspected mastermind behind the Sept. 11 terror plot, records at the North Carolina college show.
The overlap raises questions about the extent of al-Arian's ties to terrorist groups. He and his brother-in-law, Mazen al-Najjar, have been accused by federal authorities of supporting Hamas, a Palestinian militia responsible for anti-Israeli suicide bombings, through an elaborate network of terrorist front groups and fund-raising arms.
Mazen al-Najjar |
Al-Najjar, a Palestinian refugee, was arrested in 1997 and deported last year. Al-Arian, who also attended college in North Carolina, awaits trial on federal conspiracy charges related to Mideast terrorist activities. He was arrested last week.
The confluence of Islamic radicals – known then as "the mullahs" – on the North Carolina Agricultural & Technical State University (N.C. A&T) campus in Greensboro also suggests the Sept. 11 conspiracy traces its roots to North Carolina, not Florida, and goes all the way back to the 1980s.
Al-Najjar, al-Arian's childhood friend, graduated in December 1984 with a master's degree in engineering from N.C. A&T, says the college's registrar Doris Hunter. He apparently stayed in Greensboro until June 1986, when he moved to Tampa to earn a doctorate in engineering at the University of South Florida, where al-Arian taught computer engineering (before being fired Wednesday).
Hunter says Khalid A. Mohammed enrolled at N.C. A&T in the summer of 1984, after transferring from Chowan College in Murfreesboro, N.C. He graduated with an engineering degree on Dec. 18, 1986, she told WorldNetDaily.
 Khalid Mohammed |
Erik Blowers, counsel for the FBI's North Carolina field office in Charlotte, confirmed that Mohammed is the same Khalid "Shaikh" Mohammed suspected of planning and organizing the Sept. 11 attacks, as one of al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden's top lieutenants. Considered "armed and dangerous," he has a $25 million bounty on his head.
"That guy is the one who's on the FBI's 22 most-wanted terrorists list," he said in a WorldNetDaily interview. "And he did go to college here in North Carolina."
Blowers, however, was mum about any ties between Mohammed and al-Arian or his brother-in-law.
"Certainly we've looked at every aspect of this gentleman's stay here in the country," Blowers said. "But specifically what we've found or what we're doing with that information I wouldn't be able to comment on."
A spokeswoman at the Tampa FBI office, which is leading the al-Arian investigation, demurred when asked if investigators there are looking at a connection to N.C. A&T and Mohammed.
"I'm not going to confirm or deny that," said FBI spokeswoman Sara Oates.
Blowers says he cannot comment on whether or not his office has been working with the Tampa office on the al-Arian case.
"But I can tell you they know we have some history with that gentleman (Mohammed) here," he said.
Al-Arian, born in Kuwait to Palestinian parents, received both a master's degree and a doctorate in computer engineering from North Carolina State University in 1980 and 1985, records show, before joining al-Najjar at Tampa's USF. N.C. State is in Raleigh, N.C., but is affiliated with the Greensboro campus.
Mohammed, also born in Kuwait, lived in an apartment close to the Greensboro campus, authorities say. He was extremely religious, using his apartment as a place of prayer for himself and other campus Muslims.
The close-knit group of Arabs, mainly from Kuwait, who shared a common hatred of Israel (and the U.S. for supporting it), were known on campus as "the mullahs" for their strict Muslim fundamentalist beliefs and ascetic lifestyles.
Called "Khalid Shaikh" back then, Mohammed took thermodynamics classes as part of his engineering studies, which may have helped him plan the toppling of the World Trade Center. Bin Laden also has an engineering background.
Years later Mohammed headed to Manila where he teamed up with his nephew, Kuwaiti-born Ramzi Yousef, the mastermind behind 1993's World Trade Center bombing. In 1995, the two hatched a scheme to blow up a dozen U.S. jetliners and smash a hijacked jet into the CIA headquarters here. Filipino police turned over evidence of the foiled plot, code-named "Bojinka" (Serbo-Croatian for "explosion"), to U.S. authorities, who indicted Mohammed in 1996. He of course remains at large.
Meanwhile, back in Florida, federal authorities began investigating al-Arian and Al-Najjar, who entered the U.S. from Gaza on a student visa in December 1981. In 1995, FBI agents raided the World and Islamic Studies Enterprise, or WISE, co-founded by al-Arian. Al-Najjar also worked there. (Al-Arian in speeches in the late '80s and early '90s declared, "Death to Israel," as well as to America. He had also been asked about his ties to Tarik Hamdi, a former manager of the Tampa-based Islamic Committee for Palestine who was linked to al-Qaida during the trial of four men convicted in the bombings of the U.S. embassies in East Africa. Al-Arian was ICP's president.)
Then in 1997, the INS arrested al-Najjar on visa violations. And an immigration judge denied him bail based on undisclosed government evidence tying him to Mideast terrorists.
It's not immediately clear what al-Najjar was doing in Greensboro from 1984 to 1986. Maurice Warren, an N.C. A&T human resources administrator, said faculty records for that period may have been "purged," and that he could not say for certain whether al-Najjar had remained on campus to teach engineering.
N.C. A&T, a historically black college which counts Jesse Jackson among its alumni, continues to be a magnet for Islamic terrorist suspects who enroll on student visas.
Last year, a Sudanese man enrolled there was arrested, detained and later deported after pleading guilty to immigration-fraud charges. Federal authorities had linked the man, named Mekki Hamed Mekki, to al-Qaida. Trained as a commercial pilot in Sudan, he was suspected of planning to slam an aircraft into a U.S. target in a reprise of Sept. 11. Bin Laden was based in Sudan before he moved operations to Afghanistan.
Greensboro has a relatively large Sudanese population, most of whom worship at local mosques. The area has about 10,000 Muslims.
It's time to check the imigration papers of every single one of these 10,000 Muslims and GET THEM OUT OF HERE!
You would think that would have already been done, but it no doubt hasn't. The hands of the local police are tied, and the INS doesn't care.
It will take another 911 attack before anybody gets serious about the hordes of Islamics who are potential internal threats, yet live unchecked and uninvestigated in our communities.
This is a surreal situation!
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