Posted on 10/05/2005 10:22:17 AM PDT by BurbankKarl
NORMAN, Okla. -- The Pakistani roommate of a man authorities said died when he detonated an explosive device outside a crowded football stadium was led in handcuffs from a party shortly after Saturday's explosion, the head of an Islamic student group said.
Fazal M. Cheema, a finance major, shared a university-owned apartment with Joel Hinrichs III, 21, who died Saturday when a device attached to his body exploded as he sat on a bench outside George Lynn Cross Hall.
Cheema and three other Muslim students were led in handcuffs from a party by police after the blast, Ashraf Hussein, president of the Muslim Student Association, said Tuesday. They later were released.
Cheema is "a really, really nice guy," Hussein said.
OU President David Boren said authorities continue to believe that Hinrichs did not try to get into the stadium and that he acted alone. He said Hinrichs' roommate, along with his acquaintances, were questioned by federal authorities.
"All the people who lived in that building, all the people that lived in the building surrounding it, all the people who knew him well or were living in proximity to him ... have been questioned; none of those people have been held by law enforcement," Boren said.
The FBI said in a statement Tuesday that there is no current threat posed by additional explosive materials, that there is no known threat from anyone else related to the incident and that there is no known link between Hinrichs and any terrorist or extremist organization or activities.
Hinrichs' father, Joel Hinrichs Jr., said the FBI re-interviewed him Tuesday at his home in Colorado Springs, Colo. The father told investigators his son was skeptical of ideology.
"Joe would have become a Muslim fanatic when pigs fly," the father side.
Meanwhile, Norman feed store operator Dustin Ellison said Hinrichs attempted to purchase ammonium nitrate a few days before the explosion.
Ellison, whose family operates Ellison Feed and Seed, said the store no longer carries the product because of new federal guidelines regarding its sale. Ammonium nitrate can be used to build bombs and was a key ingredient in the 1995 attack on the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City.
Hinrichs' father said the FBI told him the bomb his son had was made of hydrogen peroxide. He said the FBI told him more high-density hydrogen peroxide was found in the apartment.
Good news! Thanks Doug.
Thanks for the ping! Did you see Jayna Davis is on this story?
No....do you have a link? Thanks.
No - see post #21.
Just saw it....that is great news. DFU provides FR with yet another scoop. Thanks for the ping.
You were at least making some sense on the other thread. Has someone else taken over for your id on the disinformation shift? Or are you deliberately throwing out wacky ideas to see who will bite and who will bite back?
How about this theory. US Govt has a few ready-made patsies set up to take the blame whenever there is a terrorist attack so that the sheeple don't panic. Hinrich was one of them and will now disappear, either because he was blown up, or because he will be given a new id (like the witness protection program).
Here's another wacky idea: Maybe Hinrich was an FBI agent who infiltrated and it was necessary for him for some reason to make himself memorable, maybe to make himself look both credible and idiotic to the fanatics (see, I really tried to buy the fertilizer), or to alert the cop in the store or whatever. The wired vest getup in the fertilizer store ought to do the trick. Hard to miss that. Seems reminiscent of McVeigh renting the truck.
Lemme guess... you attended charm school in Pakistan.
I do. I have gotten a fairly good inside glimpse of one of the many cliques of Pakistani students that are found at major US universities. If this perp was an actual friend of his roomate (likely) then it is also likely that he was invited to some or all of the many social events held in typical fashion by the Pakistani clique at OU. At similar events in San Fran, I noted a number of Americans in attendance. The events are lavish - with lots of booze, good food and beautiful women. One other observation is that the overall US community of Pakistani students network very effectively. After all, they are the sons and daughters of the Pakistani elites, and many of them are friends from childhood. They are from the upper couple percent of Pakistan.
With a Pakistani room mate, it is highly likely that Heinrich attended Pakistani parties and nights out. Such events can be really fun. The Pakistani students are from a very wealthy background and tend to have Euro tastes in clothing and music. They know how to party. Imagine the allure. And then, and then ...
Maybe Henrich was just a screwed up mental case who couldn't get laid and ended up rooming with a muslim.
The constant cultural difference of his muslim roomate's friends hanging around combinded with his sorry social life caused him to kill himself in spectacular fashion?
I don't think I'd use the word "rattled". "Enraged", "Madder'n a wet hen", maybe, but not rattled.
It's not like it was a dorm, where if you don't pick a roommate, they may assign you one. This was an apartment, albeit one owned by the university. In those you pick your roommate.
I reckon the two of them were friends. I reckon Henrich tagged along to multiple Pakistani social events and other sorts of gatherings. The ground work was laid.
(this is also answering several other complaints about me)
In the other thread I was trying to find out what the facts were so I could write rationally on the subject.
In this thread, which was discussing the report that the roommate was paskitani and was detained briefly, we WERE discussing, oddly enough, his pakistani roommate and the detention and why, as the article stated, he was released.
Some here speculated that the roommate had to be a terrorist. I came up with the most plausible theory I could think of in which it would LOOK like the roommate was a terrorist, but he wasn't.
My speculation that the roommate wasn't a terrorist wasn't nearly as well-received here as the speculation that the roommate was a terrorist. I don't remember any of the "rommate is a terrorist" people being asked to leave, for example.
In fact, on the other thread people speculated that the roommate had actually blown up Henrich by mistake, and I don't recall anybody suggesting they leave either.
I like fact-based threads, but I also like speculative threads. But I think in the speculative threads we should brainstorm all the plausible theories to see which best fits the evidence.
In the first thread, some had their own speculation that the media was being accurate, and chastised those who had other speculation. Here a group has a theory and is chastising someone for other speculation. Maybe I have to form my own tin foil hat club?
So far as I know, I've only thrown out one "wacky" idea here, which is that Henrichs might have set up his roommate.
I haven't rejected most of the other theories. I would have been happy to learn a fact which disproved my speculation, and as more information is coming to light this could have happened already.
If my speculation seems to be trying to drive people off the "certainty" that the roommate was a terrorist, that is what I am doing. The roommate may well be a terrorist, but I don't think we should call people terrorists until we have proof.
We aren't the police, or the FBI, or the military. Often they have to make best-guess judgments to save lives. We are an exploratory news-gathering operation Speculation is fine, but there is no need for US to jump to conclusions.
I care enough to be interested in what we find here. I simply don't care enough to do research in 2005 about what happened in 1995, given all the other things to care about happening now. It just isn't my area of focus, and many others are focused on it.
How was the bomb going to be detonated? What method was he going to use?
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