Buffalo News Editorial
All five are native-born U.S. citizens. Four are married, and at least three have children. All are in their 20s. All lived within a few blocks of each other. One drives a motorcycle. Two have suspended driver's licenses. One was voted the friendliest in his high school class. One goes to Erie Community College. One sells used cars; another works as a telemarketer.
All five are registered Democrats.
Friends say detainees lived 'all-American' lives
By SUSAN SCHULMAN, GENE WARNER and LOU MICHEL
News Staff Reporter 9/15/2002
Friends and family describe the five men in 'all-American' terms, people who work, go to school, care for their families and enjoy a good game of soccer.The descriptions hardly match the demographic profile of anyone who would train to become a terrorist, accused of operating an al-Qaida cell out of Lackawanna.
In fact, their friends and families discount the FBI's claims that the five spent time in Afghanistan, training with the same group responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States.
But for some of the men, at least, life in their hometown of Lackawanna - where at least four graduated from Lackawanna High School - was more than the routine 9-to-5 at the office and a Bills game on the weekend.
Faysal Galab, for example, left town for a few months last year, according to his brother, to study Islam in Pakistan.
At least three of the other men - even one struggling financially in recent years - went to Pakistan in recent years, according to relatives. They all traveled halfway around the world to study their religion, relatives said.
Saturday, sketchy portraits started to emerge of the five Lackawanna men of Yemeni heritage who were rounded up Friday evening and early Saturday by the FBI.
All five are native-born U.S. citizens. Four are married, and at least three have children. All are in their 20s. All lived within a few blocks of each other. One drives a motorcycle. Two have suspended driver's licenses. One was voted the friendliest in his high school class. One goes to Erie Community College. One sells used cars; another works as a telemarketer. Several are avid soccer players. All five are registered Democrats.
The five are:
• Shafal A. Mosed, 24, of 183 Ingham Ave., a Lackawanna High School graduate, married with one child. An ECC South student and telemarketer.
• Yahya A. Goba, 25, of 21 Wilkesbarre Ave., a Lackawanna High School graduate, recently married.
• Sahim A. Alwan, 29, of 24 Wilkesbarre Avenue, also a Lackawanna High School graduate.
• Yasein A. Taher, 24, of 213 Ludel Terrace. A registered Democrat and a former star soccer player for Lackawanna High School.
• Faysal H. Galab, 26, of 109 Holland Ave. Sells used cars out of a Route 5 gas station. Married, with two children. Lackawanna High School graduate.
Shafal A. Mosed is a devoted family man who grew up quickly after his father died, according to his family members.
The family moved from Detroit to Lackawanna 15 years ago when Ahmed Mosed, their husband and father, was transferred to Ford Motor Co.'s Stamping Plant here.
A few months later, a heart attack claimed him.
"That's when Shafal started taking responsibility for the family with my oldest brother Albaneh. They helped my mother," said Sofia Mosed, one of six children in the Mosed family. "Shafal cashes my mother's Social Security checks, pays her bills and gets people to repair things in her house."
Standing on the porch of their Wilkesbarre Avenue home Saturday afternoon, Fatima Mosed and her daughters refused to believe the allegations against their son and brother.
"I know my kids, and Shafal loves this country. He works in the day as a telemarketer and then at 5 p.m. he goes to college for computers. Everyone knows my son, and they say he's a nice guy," said Fatima Mosed.
"My brother is innocent. He is an American, born in Detroit," Sofia Mosed said.
The last the mother saw of her son was Friday afternoon, when he showed up at her home and shared a meal with her.
"After we ate, he said he was going to work, and he would call me later that night when he got home," Fatima Mosed said.
He never reached home. He was arrested about 7 p.m. Friday at a deli at Genesee and Sherman streets in Buffalo by the FBI.
To his mother, it all seems surreal. She would rather remember that her son is a 1996 graduate of Lackawanna High School and the best goalie the school's soccer team ever had.
Sofia Mosed said her brother for years played soccer with neighborhood friends, including Faysal Galab, another of the men arrested Friday.
Sofia also said her brother traveled to Pakistan last year to study Islam. Galab also went that year, she said, adding she doesn't know if they went together.
Relatives said they didn't know where Mosed, who is financially struggling, got the money for the trip.
"He went to Pakistan for 11/2 to two months to extend his knowledge in Islam, and it was a vacation," Sofia Mosed said of her older brother.
Shafal Mosed's wife called her husband "an all-American guy." "He cheered the Buffalo Bills," said his wife, who refused to give her name.
Though the family members remained gravely aware of the seriousness of the allegations, one member had no idea what was happening - Shafal's 3-year-old son.
Throughout Friday night and all day Saturday, the little boy wore a smile punctuated by dimples.
"I love Shafal's little boy. He's my baby," Fatima Mosed said of her grandson, Muhsin.But even the child's winning smile was not enough to distract the 46-year-old mother, who came to the United States from Yemen 25 years ago.
"I have angina, and I get migraine headaches," she said. "This is just too much for me. Shafal is a good son."
*****Yahya A. Goba's in-laws said finding work and fixing up his new house were the young man's major preoccupations. Recently married, Goba was trying to lay the foundation for a new life with his wife, they said.
Cynical, disgusted and reeling from the events of Friday, Goba's in-laws dismissed the charges against Goba as racial profiling.
"Because he's a Muslim, that's why they charged him," said Goba's father-in-law, who wouldn't give his name out of fear for his family's safety. "And tomorrow, they are going to charge me because I'm a Muslim. We probably have to change our religion."
A brother-in-law said he seriously doubted the 5-foot-10-inch Goba had the physical stamina to withstand the rigors of an al-Qaida training camp.
"He weighs about 250 pounds and complains all the time that it hurts to walk. Forget about him training," he said.
Another brother-in-law said Goba's free time was spent going to restaurants and playing soccer.
Goba's father-in-law described him as a devout Muslim who had never been arrested before, and he said he wouldn't have approved of his daughter's marrying Goba if Goba were a criminal.
"I know him, and he's not guilty," his father-in-law said. "I wed him and my daughter. I know he's a good man, and he's a good Muslim."To learn more about his faith, Goba, a Yonkers native, traveled to Pakistan a couple years ago, but had never been to Afghanistan, his father-in-law said. He arrived in Lackawanna about five years ago from New York City and had worked at a plastic plant in Holland and a deli.
Goba was married in April, and he and his wife were renting an apartment above the closed Arabian Foods store at 21 Wilkesbarre Ave., where he was arrested Friday. When he wasn't looking for a job, he was fixing up the house they had recently purchased, his in-laws said. The couple had bought a small house at 64 Lehigh Ave. and had been doing constant repairs to it and preparing to move in.
But Goba's in-laws said the FBI turned the couple's world upside down. "The way they came in was wrong," his father-in-law said of Friday's FBI raid. "They tore the house upside down and scared my daughter. She's been crying for two days."
He added that his daughter is in shock and hasn't spoken a word since Friday.
The couple's neighbors on Wilkesbarre stood outside their homes also in disbelief Saturday.
Tashara Pierce, who lives at 29 Wilkesbarre, said she saw FBI agents, armed with automatic weapons, going into and out of Goba's apartment Friday.
"My husband is in the military in Afghanistan, so this is too much for me," she said.
Jeanie Huff, who lives around the corner from Goba on Lebanon Street, said people were in and out of Goba's apartment and different cars with out-of-state license plates were parked outside the building during the summer, but she never suspected anything.
"The people you run into are nice and cordial," Huff said. "They are nice community people. You never hear of them getting into any kind of trouble. It's scary now. I feel terrorized."
*****Yasein A. Taher was popular in high school. He was voted "friendliest" in his class in 1996, the year he graduated. He was also a soccer star. In 1993, he was named to the Western New York high school all-star team for soccer. In 1995, he was co-captain of the Lackawanna Steelers varsity soccer team.
But all that was really no surprise. After all, Taher comes from a soccer-loving family.In the First Ward, Taher's uncles are well-known youth soccer coaches. They are passionate about the game. Saturday, Abdul Noman - Taher's uncle and former coach - left his front-row seat in front of a television set showing the Washington, D.C., news conference about his nephew's arrest to travel to Wilson to take part in a soccer meet.
"Yasein was excellent. He was a good player," said Noman, head of the Lackawanna Yemen Soccer Club on Ingham Avenue.
Taher played for his uncle's teams from ages 7 to 18, which is when he stopped playing organized soccer, got married and fathered a child.
Taher now lives at 213 Ludel Terrace in Lackawanna, a large yellow-brick house in a quiet residential section of the city. He owns a motorcycle, a 1998 Suzuki street model. And although Noman could remember which positions Taher played in soccer - forward and defense - he said he does not know where Taher has been working lately. Noman also said he does not know whether the FBI allegations are true. "I hope not," he said. All that Noman knows is, his nephew was a popular, athletic kid who didn't draw much attention to himself.
"He was quiet, cooperative. He likes to help and volunteer, to clean up after things," said Noman, who was born in Yemen and came to Lackawanna at age 16. "He's a good citizen; he's a good father. The news we heard last night was shocking. The United States is our country; we are part of this country. We raised our children here."
*****
Sahim A. Alwan is a man almost everybody in Lackawanna's First Ward knows - at least by sight. He's hard to miss.
That's because Alwan, although young, is a prominent leader in the mosque on Wilkesbarre Avenue. He cuts a trim figure: clean-cut, youthful, professional in appearance. He wears a shirt and tie and carries a cell phone. He drives a 2002 Ford Taurus SEL, which he uses to commute to his job as a counselor to disadvantaged young people in Medina.
When he speaks, Alwan - the son of a steelworker who spent 30 years in the Lackawanna mills - is articulate, erudite and thoughtful.
That's the way he sounded just one year ago, when, on his way into the mosque for prayers, Alwan talked briefly to a Buffalo News reporter about the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks on the Yemeni community in Lackawanna.
Alwan said then that he felt threatened by the stares of strangers. He likened the feeling to the way he felt during the Persian Gulf War, when he felt people of Arab descent were singled out for harsh looks and cutting comments.
"When I'm driving to work, when I'm at a red light, people look at me," Alwan said. "We've been saying that more than 90 percent of the community was born here. We look at ourselves as targets, like anyone else. We're targets of both now: racism and terrorism. We're double targets, as Americans and Muslims."
Alwan has long been known on the streets of Lackawanna as a local success story: a man who graduated from Lackawanna High School in 1991, got married, fathered three children and rose to a position of prominence in the mosque.
He worked at Satellite Services, a company that runs the Iroquois Job Corps Center, a training program for disadvantaged youths near Medina. The center provides academic and vocational training for nearly 300 youths.
Alwan is well-known for leading Friday night prayer services at the mosque, where he lectures the other men about topics including the proper disciplining of children. Children should show great respect to their elders, Alwan frequently told the men.
"He speaks to the people about being a good Muslim," said Munir Mohsin, a Clark Street resident who works in maintenance for the Lackawanna School District and who plays pickup soccer games with Alwan, Faysal Galab, and others. "He's a smart guy. He speaks very good, both English and Arabic. He's very quiet."
Friends of Alwan's, reacting to his arrest, said they will never believe that Alwan conspired against the country where he was born and prospered.
"I don't believe that. We would have known about it," said Thabit Hussoni, 29, a longtime friend and classmate of Alwan's in high school.
Hussoni, who owns House of Billiards in the Town of Tonawanda, said Alwan made one fatal mistake: He traveled abroad in a time when that is viewed with deep suspicion.
"They went to Pakistan. That's it," said Hussoni of the arrested men. "Is it a crime to visit Afghanistan or Pakistan or wherever? If it's a crime, then that's their crime."
*****
Faysal H. Galab is a real Lackawanna guy, according to his family. He was born there, went to high school there, played lots of soccer there and is raising his children there.
While growing up, Galab's family at times moved around, going to California and Florida for a while. But in the end, they came back to Lackawanna.
The family once traveled to Yemen to visit the country of their heritage, but everything about Galab was American, according to his brother.
"We went to Yemen in 1983 when we were just kids. We were born here in Lackawanna, and we plan to die in this country," said Moses Galab, 35, Faysal's older brother.
The Galab brothers come from a big family, with 10 children. Their father, James, is retired from Bethlehem Steel.
Faysal is married and has two children of his own, a 2-year-old daughter and 1-year-old son.
He is a businessman, selling cars at a gas station, his brother said. Galab's driver's license, however, was suspended in July for failure to answer a summons, and he hasn't had a vehicle registered to him since 1999, records show.
He's either at the Sunoco gas station where he sells cars or at the neighborhood soccer field," Moses said.
Growing up in a big family, Moses Galab said, his family was much like many other American families. At dinner time, the family talked about how everyone's day went, and sometimes talked about soccer, Moses said.
At 5 feet, 9 inches tall, Faysal was a very good soccer player, according to Moses.
"He was one of the top players," he said.
Moses described his brother as an American patriot and denied the FBI's claim that Faysal is involved with al-Qaida or spent any time in Afghanistan.
About a year ago, Moses said, his brother traveled to Pakistan and remained for a couple months. But he was there studying Islam, not crossing into Afghanistan to train with al-Qaida, Moses insisted.
"That's absurd. Baloney," he said of the government claims. "He was in Pakistan last year sometime. He just went to learn the religion."
Moses said his brother was aware of the FBI investigation in Lackawanna and even planned to testify before a federal grand jury. But authorities had a change of mind and went on a manhunt for him Friday night, he said.
Faysal was among the last of five Lackawanna men to be taken into custody Friday, Moses said. "He wasn't hiding. He has a subpoena to testify Sept. 26. He's as American as you can be. He watches hockey. He was born and raised here," Moses said.
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