[Future Useless Eater]

In June, Muhammad planned sniper shootings of a gas truck, and a police officer. He also planned to bomb the police funeral. By September his plans changed to (random?) sniper killings.

So here are my collections of the facts and assumptions:

• THREE or more terrorists cooked up the plan to buy a used POLICE CAR and turn it into a killing machine.
• September 11 - Three of them buy the car and register it in New Jersey. The date, and the fact that it was a police car are both important to them.
  Muhammad and Osbourne co-registered the car while another calls in a bomb threat at the DMV.
• September 14 - The shooters try out their sniper car for the first time outside a Silver Spring, Maryland liquor store on a SATURDAY night. The victim survives, and the bullet is too fragmented to match with later shootings. No more sniper shootings occur there for two and a half weeks because the terrorists are out of town.
• September 14- Thinking they've killed someone at the liquor store, terrorists leave immediately for a planned two-week training at "Ground Zero" camp in Marion, Alabama. The terrorist training manuals teach shooters to lay down and fire backwards out of a vehicle (like a flatbed truck). with another person driving away slowly. This later turns out to be exactly the technique used around D.C.
• September 21 - While in Alabama, Muhammad and Malvo rob and kill at a Montgomery liquor store. Again, this is a Saturday night. A third terrorist assists their escape using the blue Chevrolet Caprice.
• October 1 - Terrorists drive all night to return to Silver Spring, Maryland, all pumped up to kill. They get rested at a safe-house, possibly at the Mohammed residence (apartment #5) at 3974 Bel Pre Road, [this is the same address as the last shooting]. Nation of Islam converts often change their last names to Mohammad, and the shooters know them to be sympathetic or co-conspirators themselves.
• October 2 - Terrorists spend the day planning their hits, and by 5pm start their shooting spree one block from the apartment, at the Michaels store. [Police should check if the store clerk almost killed had ever met John Mohammad, Lee Malvo, or anyone living at the Bel Pre apartments]
• Another shooting will later occur TWO blocks from the apartment, at a gas station.
• Police are convinced the shooters must live nearby, since so many shooting occur in close proximity and shooters know the area very well.
• The last fatal shooting will occur directly outside the apartment on Bel Pre road. Mohammad, who frequently rides busses in that area, probably knew, and has been angered in the past by the driver or one of his co-workers.

[anniegetyourgun]

This guy has apparently had a long history of hatred for authority.

[Grampa Dave]

Fl, this is a great job of documentation of the events and a probable time line of the critical events.

Thanks for your efforts and the ping!

[LibWhacker]

Nice synopsis. Thanks. Floored by the revelation that police had a description of this vehicle on OCT7, ran its plates 10 TIMES in the vicinity of the shootings, and there were CLEARLY VISIBLE GUN PORTS in the trunk (the gun ports are EXACTLY the sort of thing authorities should've been on the lookout for).

This goes way beyond incompetence, imo. It's willful, reckless, negligence.

[browardchad]

September 14- Thinking they've killed someone at the liquor store, terrorists leave immediately for a planned two-week training at "Ground Zero" camp in Marion, Alabama. The terrorist training manuals teach shooters to lay down and fire backwards out of a vehicle (like a flatbed truck). with another person driving away slowly. This later turns out to be exactly the technique used around D.C.

I'm not sure that will ever be proved, although it would explain what they were doing in Alabama, and the different MO used in the later shootings. LE is apparently very defensive of Camp Ground Zero -- in spite of its links to foreign terrorists -- since the owner insists the camp "trains law enforcement and security personnel."

On the night of the arrests, Fox asked one of their military experts (Hunt) about Ground Zero, and he was sputtering: "It's just a civilian shooting range -- anybody can shoot there. Nothing to that."

[per loin]

Good stuff. Throw these speculations into the mix:
The Caprice had been formerly used as a police undercover car.(reported as a fact)
Might the sniper perch and hole(s) already been in the car? Perhaps used by the cops to film or surveil?
If so, does it not seem wildly coincidental that Muhammad would stumble across such a vehicle? Might he have been told by someone where to look?
BTW, $250 seems like a ridiculously low price for a running vehicle.

[GoreLoser]

Nice piece of analysis, FL_engineer, but how do you explain these 2 idiots' practically begging the incompetent LE bozos to nail them?