Posted on 01/07/2002 10:27:15 AM PST by knighthawk
Alleged shoe-bomber Richard Reid was a follower of a radical Islamic spiritual leader who trained more than 100 Americans in terror techniques, it has been claimed.
The Boston Globe newspaper says Reid had been linked to Sheik Mubarik Ali Gilani, a Pakistani radical spiritual leader.
He has recruited mostly black Americans for terror attacks on the country.
The FBI has had Gilani and his followers under surveillance since the first World Trade Centre attack in 1993 and redoubled its monitoring of the group since the September 11 terror strikes.
Gilani is the founder of a group called Jamaat Al Fuqra, Arabic for "the impoverished", which the American State Department says has the main goal of purifying Islam through violence.
The newspaper reports Pakistani officials have discovered that Reid visited Gilani's home in the Pakistani city of Lahore.
"He was there," one official told the newspaper, while a member of Gilani's extended family also confirmed the 28-year-old Londoner had been to Lahore.
One of Gilani's followers, a Canadian called Saldar Joginder Singh, who served time in an Indian prison for hijacking a plane, said: "There are so many followers that sometimes you don't know who all your followers are."
Reid was arrested on December 22 after allegedly trying to light a bomb concealed in the sole of his shoe while on an American Airlines flight from Miami to Paris.
Passengers overwhelmed the former petty thief, who converted to Islam while in prison, and a doctor on the flight sedated him before the pilot diverted to Boston, and the FBI arrested him.
Meet the Press asked yesterday why more moderate Muslim leaders
won't come forward and condemn the 9/11 attacks.
It's because Fuqra has stabbed moderate Imams IN BROAD DAYLIGHT.
Wanna scare a Muslim?
Tell him you're from Al-Fuqra.
They've killed several moderate Imams in the past 20 or so years.
Normal, nice Muslims (and you must have some neighbors in that category) can't even go to the mosques in fear of them.
Imagine if the Eric Robert Rudolphs and David Koreshs of the world along with a mess of snake-handling inbred Christian weirdos took over mainstream Christianity and killed anyone who was a moderate Christian (like Baptists, Episcopalians or Catholics).
That is what has happened to Islam in the past 20 years.
Even John Ashcroft says, "These people have hijacked their religion."
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