The case was that of Basaaly Moalin, a Somali-born U.S. citizen living in San Diego. In July, 2013, Sean Joyce, the F.B.I.’s deputy director at the time, said in Senate-committee testimony that Moalin’s phone number had been in contact with an “Al Qaeda East Africa member” in Somalia... After the Somali government collapsed, in 1991, the community, which now numbered more than a thousand, spread up Winona toward University Avenue. In 2000, a group of Somalis borrowed half a million dollars to buy an old church at Winona and University and converted it into a mosque, the Masjid Al Ansar. They hired an imam, Mohamed Mohamed Mohamud, also known as Mohamed Khadar, who had spent years studying the Koran in Islamabad, Pakistan. Khadar was a charismatic speaker and one of the leaders of a national council of Somali-American imams. Within two years, he had raised enough money to pay off the mosque’s mortgage. According to one of Khadar’s attorneys, the F.B.I. approached him multiple times. “I think they came to his house and to the mosque,” the attorney told me. “He exercised his right not to talk.” A law-enforcement official familiar with the Masjid Al Ansar told me that a paid informant had said that some of the mosque’s worshippers were recruiting jihadist fighters. This lead “correlated with other information, especially historically, when you look at Anwar al-Awlaki,” the official said. (“I’ve never heard this and it’s not true,” Bashir Hassan, the president of the mosque’s board, said.)
Posted on: Tue, 20 Jan 2015 22:36:39 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015