Posted on 02/13/2002 10:08:09 PM PST by kattracks
Edited on 07/12/2004 3:37:25 PM PDT by Jim Robinson. [history]
Amazing how quiet the press is on firebombings in the US, isn't it? wonder where all of these suspected fire bombings took place?
Al Fuqra suspected of firebombing Hare Krishna temple in the US
By CHARLIE BRENNAN
The radical Islamic leader linked to the kidnapping of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl has been tied to a wide range of illegal activity throughout Colorado.
The extremist group is believed to still have compounds in New York, California, South Carolina and Virginia.
Through a broad-based investigation launched in 1989, Colorado authorities convicted four members of the al-Fuqra movement on a series of felonies including racketeering, forgery, conspiracy to commit first-degree murder and the 1984 firebombing of a Hare Krishna temple in Denver.
Those who helped lead those investigations said the Pakistani-based leader of al-Fuqra, Sheik Mubarik Ali Jilani, briefly owned two lots in downtown Buena Vista.
Susan Fenger, then an investigator for the state Department of Labor and Employment, helped build the case against the Colorado al-Fuqra members.
She said Jilani had been in Colorado.
"Sheikh Mubarik Jilani was the leader of al-Fuqra and still is," said Fenger, now working privately as a forensic documents examiner.
"Sheikh Jilani visited Colorado, we know that," said Doug Wamsley, a prosecutor in the Jefferson County District Attorney's office. Wamsley, then an assistant attorney general, led the prosecution against four al-Fuqra members in the early 1990s.
"We have at least one witness who remembered Jilani from the Buena Vista area, where he had talked to a Realtor and arranged to buy a piece of property," said Wamsley. "But then it was sold, right away. We didn't pay much attention to it, because he held it so briefly."
Pearl was seeking to interview Jilani when he vanished on Jan. 23 in Karachi. Jilani has been questioned in the Pearl kidnapping, but has reportedly denied knowing anything about it.
Fenger described al-Fuqra's presence in Colorado now as minimal.
Jilani was questioned in connection with the Pearl kidnapping, Fenger said, after police intercepted a communication from Jilani to al-Fuqra members at their compound in Red Huse, Va.
(Contact Charlie Brennan of the Rocky Mountain News at http://www.rockymountainnews.com.)
Muslim terrorists convicted on firearms charges in the US
Author: Jen McCaffery
Publication: The Roanoke Times, Virginia
Date: December 1, 2001
Purchase was illegal for convicted felon 2 guilty of plot to buy pistols
Authorities say the man is linked to a radical group, though that didn't come up during trial.
Lynchburg - The jurors never heard the words Al-Fuqra.
They did not hear that Vincente Pierre has been linked by federal authorities to Al-Fuqra, a radical Islamic group whose members have been convicted of the firebombing of a Hare Krishna temple in Colorado, and the murder of an imam in Tucson. They did not hear that Pierre pleaded guilty in Colorado in 1993 to workers' compensation fraud in an Al-Fuqra scheme.
Instead, Pierre and his wife, Traci Upshur, were tried on evidence that Pierre, a convicted felon, arranged for his wife to buy firearms for him because it was illegal for him to possess them. Unlike at Pierre's detention hearing, the evidence presented against him at his trial did not hint at Pierre's past.
The jury found the evidence convincing enough to convict the couple, who have eight children, of conspiring to buy two handguns for Pierre. Pierre, 44, and Upshur, 37, were convicted of conspiracy and making false statements. Pierre was convicted of six counts, and Upshur was convicted of four counts and was found not guilty on a fifth count of making false statements on another occasion.
They face up to five years on each count at their sentencing, scheduled for April.
Federal prosecutor Tom Bondurant said he brought up the Al-Fuqra link at Pierre's detention hearing because he argued that Pierre was a flight risk and a danger to the community. But he did not bring it up at the trial because "we had no basis to bring it up. His association with any group has nothing to do with this case."
He declined to say whether he thought any other community members were being investigated. Members of the group have denied any connection to terrorist activity in the past and pointed out that Muslims were killed in the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11. Pierre and Upshur declined to comment after the verdict, as did some of their supporters in the courtroom.
Susan Fenger, a retired former chief criminal investigator on the case in Colorado, was on hand for the trial and talked about Al-Fuqra. She investigated Pierre in the Colorado case. Pierre was sentenced to probation after his conviction.
Fenger said the leader of the group, Sheikh Jilani, had been met with terrorist organizations in Sudan in 1993. She said the group is still active.
"Its main focus is to purify Islam through force or violence," she said.
The group "paints a face to the public that they are peaceful people," Fenger said. "But that's all a front. Al-Fuqra is set up to defraud various agencies."
The jury found Pierre guilty Friday of conspiring with his wife to buy .45-caliber handguns for him at a shop called the Outpost, outside Appomatox. Pierre would order and pay for the weapons, while Upshur would sign the paperwork. John Massarini, a retired police chief from New Jersey who owns the Outpost, assisted Special Agent Thomas Gallagher of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms with the investigation.
The defendants' case was likely damaged when Upshur took the stand and said she was buying the handguns for herself, even though she displayed little familiarity with the workings of the weapons and admitted she had never fired a gun. Upshur testified that she bought the gun for self-defense, then testified that she kept it at the home of someone else in the community.
Pierre, who Bondurant argued gave a fake name of Rafael Upshur at the gun shop, did not take the stand.
Defense lawyers Thomas Wray of Roanoke and Gary Smith and Carter Foulds of Winchester attacked Massarini for discrepancies in his testimony and about whether he assumed Rafael's last name was Upshur because that was his wife's name or whether Pierre told him that.
Gallagher said he was also assisting with another Al- Fuqra case in California, involving the death of a police officer.
Finally the story got picked up by some of the press and the Washington Times.
At that time a lot of Freepers laughed at us in Kali with this training ground near Fresno. Now many of those who laughed at us are now waking up and realizing that these dangerous people are in their back yards.
By REBECCA MILLER
Associated Press Writer
Published January 2, 2002
RICHMOND, Va. -- A federal magistrate on Wednesday ordered a Charlotte County man linked to a terrorist cell to remain in federal custody and face arraignment in Roanoke.
Bilal Adullah Ben Benu, 27, was indicted on several firearms charges.
Magistrate Judge Dennis W. Donhal called Benu a flight risk and a danger to the community.
"I have serious doubts that you would obey anything I would say," Donhal told Benu.
Benu is charged with taking AK-47 ammunition across state lines, buying a 9 mm pistol and taking a pistol across state lines.
Because he was previously convicted in Maryland for cocaine possession and was sentenced to more than a year in prison, he is forbidden by law from buying or possessing firearms or ammunition.
Authorities indicted Benu on Sept. 18, and later found him in the custody of the Powhatan County police, who were holding him on a driving violation.
Thomas Gallagher, a special agent with the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, testified Wednesday that Benu resides in a Muslim enclave in Red House linked to the al-Fuqra. The organization is a black Muslim sect that authorities in Canada and the United States have linked to bombings, murder and arson.
In 1992, Colorado's attorney general charged al-Fuqra members in Buena Vista, Colo., with firebombing a Hare Krishna temple in 1984 and conspiracy to murder a Muslim cleric in 1990. The cleric, Sheik Rashad Khalifa of Tucson, Ariz., was killed after receiving death threats over his interpretation of the Quran.
"We're concerned that we have a man convicted of drug possession who has possession of firearms and lives with people who have a violent history," Assistant U.S. Attorney John Davis said. "Caution dictates that this court ought to detain this man."
Amy Austin, Benu's attorney, argued that too much time had elapsed--two years--between Benu's purchasing the firearms and ammunition and his indictments.
"More recent events have moved this up as a priority," Davis said.
Benu and two fellow Red House residents convicted of conspiracy and making false statements were not involved in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, authorities said.
Then the mediots would jump all over these stories, and then we could tell the reality after they jump. We could say that black churches were in those buildings!
The Jammat-ul-Fuqra and the Harkat-ul-Mujahideen (HUM) of Pakistan. The Tablighi Jamaat (TJ) of Pakistan, which has been involved in terrorism in Chechnya and Dagestan, operates in the US and the Caribbean directly through its own preachers deputed from Pakistan and also recruited from the Pakistani immigrant community in the US as well as through front organisations such as the Jamaat-ul-Fuqra founded in the 1980s under the leadership of Sheikh Mubarik Ali Gilani, who generally lived in Pakistan, but used to travel frequently to the US and the Caribbean.
The annual report on the Patterns of Global Terrorism during 1998 issued by the Counter-Terrorism Division of the US State Department stated as follows on the Jamaat-ul-Fuqra: "Seeks to purify Islam through violence. Members have purchased isolated rural compounds in North America to live communally, practise their faith and insulate themselves from Western culture. Fuqra members have attacked a variety of targets that they view as enemies of Islam, including Muslims they regard as heretics and Hindus. Attacks during the 1980s included assassinations and fire bombings across the US. Fuqra members in the US have been convicted of criminal violations, including murder and fraud."
The HUM had in the past claimed to have trained at least 18 Muslims living in the US in organising a jehad in the US. It was declared by the US in October, 1997, as an international terrorist organisation. The HUM, which has a presence in the US, is a member of bin Laden's Front and acts as his front organisation in countries, where his Al Qaeda does not have a presence. The Fuqra has in the past not come to notice for any association with bin Laden, but this cannot be ruled out.
Excerpts:
A shadowy African-American Muslim sect with ties to Pakistan is coming under closer law enforcement scrutiny as investigators probe the World Trade Center bombing and the alleged plot to bomb the United Nations and the Hudson River tunnels, according to law enforcement sources.Husain Abdullah, the head of a Brooklyn, N.Y., security company and one of the early organizers of Fuqra in the United States, denies that the sect engages in terrorism. The sect's U.S. origins can be traced to Brooklyn in 1980, when a charismatic Muslim mystic from Pakistan, Sheik Mubarik Ali Jilani Hasmi, began preaching at what at that time was the most influential black American mosque in the borough. Jilani later returned to his base in Lahore, Pakistan, but has traveled to the United States a number of times, authorities say.
According to the files of the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, Fuqra members are suspected of involvement in 16 bombings or attempting bombings throughout America since 1979.
I guess the Feds have been too busy with diversity training and all that...
The Osama stuff is quite good.
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