"In an opinion piece published in Tuesday's Los Angeles Times, Yusuf Islam said he and his 21-year-old daughter were on their way to Nashville last week to look into a music project when their flight from London was diverted to Bangor, Maine."
Cat Stevens: 'I am a victim' - September 29, 2004
Coincidence? You make the call.
From the LA Weekly (April 25-May 1, 2003)
AL HADDAD ENTERPRISES, INC.
(Formerly based in Nashville, Tennessee — defunct)
1984 to 1985 — Company sold 60 tons of DMMP, a material used to make sarin gas, to Iraq. Also provided chemical-production equipment to Iraq. In 1984, customs officials at Kennedy International Airport seized another Al Haddad shipment of 1,100 pounds of potassium fluoride, a chemical used in nerve-gas production. Al Haddad was not charged in this attempted transfer of chemicals, which were destined for Iraq’s Ministry of Pesticides. This firm also received letters of credit from BNL (an Italian bank) totaling $134,988 to sell knives and rubber blankets to Technical Corp. for Special Projects, an Iraqi front company. (Note: See Banca Nazionale del Lavoro entry for information about BNL’s Iraqi loans and letters of credit.)
The firm was owned by Sahib Abd al-Amir al-Haddad, an Iraqi-born, naturalized American citizen. According to corporate records from Tennessee’s Department of State, Al Haddad operated a number of registered firms, which are all inactive, dissolved or merged out. These firms included Al Haddad Enterprises, Inc.; A. Saleh & S. Al-Haddad, Inc.; and Al-Haddad Bros. Enterprises, Inc. Recent stories in The New York Times and The Tennessean reported that al-Haddad was arrested in Bulgaria in November 2002 while trying to arrange an arms sale to Iraq. At last report, Al-Haddad, 59, was awaiting extradition to Germany, where he is charged with conspiring in the late 1990s to purchase equipment for the manufacture of a giant Iraqi cannon.
Every one of the Commies at the Nashville Peace and Justice center who staged those protests in which this punk participated should be hauled in as suspects as well.