USF tells how terror allegations unfolded - 4 from school named in indictment

Ultimately, they all were aliases for terrorists, the FBI now says, who for more than a decade used the University of South Florida to serve their purposes: providing financial and organizational support for suicide bombings and other killings intended to destroy Israel.

It began, USF officials say, as an honest if naive attempt to expand the young and ambitious university's Middle Eastern studies program as interest increased during the Gulf War crisis. It ended Thursday, with the unsealing of a federal grand jury indictment that named eight men and led to the arrest of four.

''The defendants and [Palestinian Islamic Jihad] utilized USF as an institution where some of their members could receive cover as teachers or students,'' the indictment said. ``Additionally, USF was utilized by PIJ as the instrumentality through which the co-conspirators could bring other PIJ members and associates into the United States under the guise of academic conferences and meetings.''

The indictment links to the Palestinian Islamic Jihad at least four men with USF ties. The principal suspect, Sami al-Arian, has been a professor of computer engineering at the school for 17 years. Investigators say he leads PIJ in the United States.

In addition to al-Arian, the indictment named USF doctoral student Sameeh Hammoudeh and former USF lecturer Ramadan Abdullah Shallah, who had moved to Syria by the time the United States first declared him a terrorist in 1995 and now is a primary leader of PIJ.

It also describes a ninth man as an ''unindicted coconspirator:'' al-Arian's brother-in-law Mazen al-Najjar, a part-time Arabic instructor at USF deported last August after years of imprisonment on secret charges.

Their link to USF and Tampa began in 1986, when al-Arian arrived from North Carolina State University and entered a tenure-track teaching position in USF's growing school of engineering. A few years later, during the Gulf War crisis, a Middle East studies committee began looking for ways to increase Middle Eastern and Arabic programs at the school.

''USF was receiving encouragement from [officials at MacDill Field in Tampa, home of the United States Central Command], including General Norman H. Schwarzkopf, to develop scholarly interest in, and devote research and instructional effort to, the Middle East region,'' according to an independent report attorney Reece Smith wrote for the university in 1996, after media reports increased and an FBI investigation was under way.

Al-Arian introduced the committee to the World and Islamic Studies Program, WISE, a think-tank al-Arian had founded in Tampa in 1991 as a center that would increase understanding of the Muslim world. Like al-Arian and al-Najjar, many WISE members were Muslim clerics.

Al-Arian's initial plan had been to base WISE in Washington, D.C., but when fundraising and logistical needs proved too challenging, Tampa, already home for al-Arian and al-Najjar, became the headquarters.

The USF Middle Eastern studies committee, headed by now-retired professor Mark Orr, jumped at the chance to connect with WISE. With no Southeastern university offering a broad curriculum on the Middle East, USF, established in 1956, saw an opportunity to establish a niche.

''We'd never really had a strong Middle Eastern studies program,'' USF spokesman Michael Reich said.

Tampa soon became an important destination for al-Arian's colleagues, and Middle East studies grew at USF.

It was 1992: the same year al-Arian founded the Islamic Academy of Florida, a K-12 school for Muslim children near USF; the same year Sameeh Hammoudeh arrived in Tampa and allegedly helped al-Arian and Shallah alter the wills of three PIJ suicide bombers using WISE computers; the same year al-Najjar allegedly used a USF credit union account for terrorist purposes, receiving by wire $99,990 from a ''co-conspirator'' in the United Arab Emirates.

By 1994, Shallah also was a visiting teacher at USF, teaching Arabic through the relationship with WISE.

In addition to his roles at the university, WISE and the Islamic Academy, al-Arian had founded the Islamic Committee for Palestine in 1988, and presented the group as a U.S.-based support network for Middle Easterners in need, including orphans.

As ties between WISE and USF were strengthening, a journalist named Steven Emerson was completing a television documentary that, combined with other media reports and an ongoing FBI investigation, would rattle USF for much of the next decade.

PBS aired Emerson's documentary, Jihad in America, in 1994. The program claimed al-Arian was raising money for PIJ.

The program prompted more media coverage, sometimes skeptical of the allegations. The next year the FBI raided the offices of al-Arian and al-Najjar. USF then put al-Arian on paid leave for two years beginning in 1996.

Emerson, now a frequently consulted terrorism expert who runs the Investigative Project, a terrorism archive in Washington, D.C., said in an interview last week that USF, the media and even national politicians played indirect roles in protecting al-Arian and his alleged conspirators by not looking closely enough at their activities.

Count 42 of the indictment says, ``The enterprise members would and did make false statements and misrepresent facts to representatives of the media to promote the goals of PIJ.''

Emerson said al-Arian exploited freedom of speech and freedom of religion -- fundamental elements of American constitutional rights -- along with the tolerant atmosphere of a university setting, to mask terrorist activity.

''He had the humanitarian cover. He had the religious cover and he had an academic cover,'' Emerson said. ``I call it the trifecta of Western vulnerability.''

Former USF president Betty Castor, who left the school in 1999, said Friday the university ''acted prudently'' during the ongoing FBI investigation of al-Arian and other USF students and teachers.

Two years after putting al-Arian on leave, with no concrete evidence from law enforcement, USF allowed al-Arian to return to teaching in 1998.

''The university always cooperated with law enforcement and particularly the FBI,'' Castor said. Law enforcement ``could never extend enough information.''

Firing a tenured professor is a complicated process that requires extensive justification; Castor made no moves to terminate al-Arian.

''I suppose we could have left him on paid leave but it would have been hard to justify doing that forever,'' she said. ``It was an uncomfortable position and I'm pleased this is moving toward a resolution.''

''It's hard to go back and reconstruct,'' Castor said. ``I don't want to add what-ifs to the whole issue.''

Yet another man related to USF, former instructor Dr. Khalil Shikaki, was the brother of Fathi Shikaki, one of the founders of Palestinian Islamic Jihad who was assassinated in Malta in 1995. Khalil Shikaki moved to Florida in late 1990 to lead WISE, which was incorporated early the next year. He is not named in the indictment.

The one defendant with Tampa ties but no reported link to USF is Hatim Naji Fariz, accused of supporting fundraising for terrorists.

Fariz came to Florida about a year ago from the Chicago area, leaving a job as a courier. Manal Ramadan, the woman at Fariz's Spring Hill home who identified herself as his wife, said Fariz had met al-Arian and al-Najjar once or twice in Illinois, but she said the relationships were not the reason the couple moved to the Tampa area.

Ramadan said they came because Fariz had accepted a job as office manager in a medical clinic. She later got a job teaching at al-Arian's Islamic Academy. She said Hammoudeh's wife also teaches there.

At USF, spokesman Reich said the school is more careful now about creating alliances with outside groups. He emphasized that under current president Judy Genshaft, USF has begun the process of firing al-Arian.

''We didn't have the proper systems in place for entering into partnerships,'' Reich said of the alliance between USF and WISE. ``We've grown up quickly in the last decade.''

Asked how USF reviews its employees' pasts, Reich said of those accused this week, ``There's nothing in their background that would have shown up in a background check.''

The bulk of the alleged ''overt acts'' occurred after the men were connected to USF.

Background on the Shikaki Clan from a sympathetic NYT article in 1998.
By ETHAN BRONNER

EHOVOT, Israel -- At first, Ibrahim Shikaki is lost amid the widened roads, bowling alley and Toyota garage off Menachem Begin Avenue. But having spent his first 20 years here in what was once the village of Zarnouga, he insists that even at age 70 he will gain his bearings. At the intersection of streets remembering Israelis who fought in the 1967 and 1973 wars, he says: "Turn right. The mosque used to be that way."

It still is, up a dirt road, crumbling and fenced off, with six-foot-high weeds climbing a steel door that now bears a Star of David. The sight of the dome from which Shikaki used to call for prayers produces tales of his imam father, the surviving mulberry tree elicits memories of his sister, and the few remaining houses from his era bring to his tongue the names of their former owners -- Ahmed Nimr here, Hashem Qassab there.

The Shikakis farmed this land for generations, if not centuries, cultivating wheat and apricots, oranges and cucumbers. In May 1948, they fled the fighting that led to the establishment of Israel and were never permitted back. Their house was demolished and their land given to Jews. Today their former village is on the outskirts of the Israeli city of Rehovot, and the clan lives as refugees in the sand-choked, litter-strewn town of Rafah at the southern edge of the Gaza Strip.

The last half century has not been an easy one for Shikaki, scion of a respected village family eking out a living as a day laborer in the Jewish state. In many ways, his story and that of his eight children -- including a founder of Islamic Holy War, a professor, a businessman and unskilled workers -- is that of the Palestinian people, a saga of humiliation and fury but also one of emerging accommodation and rebirth.

Israel is observing its 50th anniversary, celebrating the vibrant and democratic regional superpower established upon the ashes of Nazi genocide. But for the Palestinian Arabs, the anniversary marks the Nakba, or catastrophe.

The Arabs had rejected the 1947 U.N. plan to partition British-controlled Palestine into Jewish and Arab states, and when Israel declared its independence the next spring, five Arab countries attacked. By the time the fighting ended, Israel had conquered far more land than had been allotted to it under the plan, and some 700,000 people -- half the Palestinian Arab population at the time -- had fled or were driven out.

Those who remained within Israel took up the truncated existence of internal refugees, mistrusted and feared, seeking a middle way between their state and their people. The rest were scattered, largely around the Arab world, many in refugee camps in Lebanon, Jordan, Syria and Egyptian-controlled Gaza. They lived from sacks of U.N. rations and in temporary shelters that many have never left. Others ended up in the Persian Gulf, Africa, Europe and the Americas.

Stunned into quiescence for decades, the Palestinians channeled their rage in the late 1960s -- after the 1967 Arab-Israeli war left the West Bank and Gaza Strip under Israeli control -- through Yasser Arafat's Soviet-backed Palestine Liberation Organization, hijacking airplanes and setting off bombs. In the late 80s, the occupied territories exploded into a rock-throwing, tire-burning anti-Israel rebellion known as the intifada.

Long preoccupied with their own nation-building, the Israelis could no longer look away. And the Palestinians, in the post-Soviet world, understood they had to scale back their demands. In 1993, on the South Lawn of the White House, the unimaginable occurred: Arafat and the Israeli prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, shook hands and agreed on interim limited self-rule for Gaza and portions of the West Bank. There is one year left to that deal, which has stalled under mutual recrimination.

'Do Americans Know? Do They Care?'

The focus this month on celebration of the events of 1948 has been galling for Palestinians, who feel their agony has been ignored.

"Do Americans know our land was taken by force?" Ibrahim Shikaki asked recently, sitting in his living room in Rafah, the muezzin's call to prayer piercing the early evening air. "Do they care? There were United Nations resolutions demanding we be allowed to go back to our land. But they were not enforced. America imposes resolutions on Iraq but not on Israel."

For most Israelis, the idea of Shikaki staking claim to victimhood is chilling. His first-born, Fathi Shikaki, founded the Iranian-backed Islamic Holy War organization, whose stated goal is to destroy the Jewish state through armed struggle and replace it with a Palestinian state based on sharia, or Muslim law.

The Israeli military says Islamic Holy War has been behind scores of attacks on Israelis here and abroad, including one on an Israeli tour bus in Egypt in February 1990, in which 9 tourists were killed and 17 wounded. In January 1995, an Islamic Holy War member placed two bombs at a soldiers' hitchhiking post in north-central Israel, killing 20 soldiers and a civilian. In September of that year, a suicide bomber from the same group rammed his car into a bus in the Gaza Strip and caused the death of 7 soldiers and an American student.

Six weeks later, Fathi, in transit to his base in the Syrian capital, Damascus, was assassinated in Malta. Israel does not take responsibility for such operations, but it is nearly universally assumed both here and abroad that his killing was the work of Israeli agents.

Fathi Shikaki was born in a Gaza refugee camp in 1951 and, like many others, his early years were marked by hardship and displacement. Two-thirds of the one million inhabitants of the strip are refugees or their descendants and half of them are still in camps. The man who would later view Ayatollah Khomeini as a model and promote street knifings and suicide bombings was a gifted pupil. Pushed to study by his illiterate mother, he won a scholarship to medical school in Cairo. He later combined his practice as a physician with gun-running until jailed and ultimately deported by Israel in 1988.

Paradoxically, Fathi was a man of warmth and natural leadership who impressed nearly all who met him with his verbal skill and nuanced mind. He is considered an important Palestinian political theorist, among the first to call for regional Islamic revival through a focus on the Palestinians and to look to Iran as a model for Arabs. This physician was among the first proponents of violence in the Islamic camp.

The paradoxes do not stop there. One of the most thoughtful and critical analysts of Fathi's work is his brother Khalil Shikaki, 44, the second son of Ibrahim and Khadra Shikaki and a political scientist who rejects all violence and works closely with several Israeli scholars.

Khalil Shikaki, who earned his Ph.D. from Columbia University, is a professor at Al-Najah University in the West Bank city of Nablus and director of the Center for Palestine Research and Studies, one of the few independent research institutes in the Arab world.

Khalil, who looks remarkably like his brother -- the same eyes, the same beard, the same build -- says the split between them over how to handle the tragedy that befell their parents is common in Palestinian families.

"The national and Islamic ideologies have taken over from the family as a structural unit," he said. "In the past, the families controlled everything with family loyalty coming first and foremost. Now, Islamic and nationalist ideologies have completely transformed Palestinian society."

Khalil's research center has the feel of a Western academic institution with its beige carpeting and potted plants and young researchers staring at computer screens. But its work, especially its opinion surveys, is pioneering here. Its field workers have had to draw their own maps of towns and neighborhoods and conduct their own demographic research because of a lack of data.

Palestinians, like most Arabs, are unused to offering opinions on their leaders without fear of reprisal, so the center has worked hard at training the poll-takers to reduce suspicions among the public. Palestinian and Israeli scholars agree that Khalil's data, which come out monthly, are the most consistently reliable.

West Bankers, Gazans, All In A Family

Khalil's wife, Wafa, who is from the West Bank town of Tulkarm, works on an American-financed project promoting democratic attitudes. While she covers her head in Muslim tradition, their three children -- Muna, 18, Ibrahim, 14, and Leila, 11 -- look very American in their T-shirts and pants. Muna, who does not cover her head, will enter Bir Zeit University next fall and says she wants to devote herself to her people, perhaps as a journalist. She has already begun a muckraking career, having investigated Palestinian police abuse in her town for "The Awakening," the high school newspaper she founded.

"We run lots of features on human rights and democracy," she said.

Like most West Bankers, Khalil Shikaki's family rarely makes visits to Gaza. The Israeli authorities do not issue many permits for movement between the two zones because of security concerns. In fact, Palestinians, despite having their own police force and elected parliament and passports and other trappings of self-determination, are subject to Israeli security requirements and often feel caged in by such restrictions. Their autonomous zones are not contiguous and they find themselves faced with Israeli checkpoints on all sides.

So contact between Khalil's family and their Gaza cousins is rare. For Muna and her siblings, their notion of Palestine is limited to the West Bank, a more prosperous and less traditional area of about 1.7 million, compared with the more religious, socially conservative Gaza.

If the split between Khalil and his older brother, Fathi, offers a Palestinian case study, it is their brother next in line, Abdul-Aziz, 42, who may be more emblematic still, embodying common and important contradictions. Another good student and winner of a scholarship to Egypt to become a pharmacist, Abdul-Aziz married his first cousin, Nima, who was studying medicine there. His association with the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt led to his expulsion from the country after he completed his studies.

Abdul-Aziz, like most Palestinians, considers his Islamic militant brother a hero, and when his sixth child was born a few months ago, he was named Fathi.

As is common in Gaza, Abdul-Aziz is an observant Muslim who prays daily and says he believes that suicide bombers who attack Israelis go to Paradise. He dismisses the 1993 deal between Israel and the PLO on Palestinian autonomy as a sham. He sees no difference between Benjamin Netanyahu, the hawkish Israeli prime minister accused by Arabs of stalling the process, and his predecessor, Rabin, who was assassinated for his peace efforts. Neither would give the Palestinians what is rightfully theirs, he says.

Finally, Abdul-Aziz insists that there can be no peace or justice until his family wins back its ancestral farmland, a move no Israeli government would countenance and a goal that Arafat's Palestinian Authority has effectively abandoned.

And yet Abdul-Aziz Shikaki's actions reveal a hidden pragmatism. While offering a picture of utter despair, he is in fact deeply engaged in the process of constructing a new Palestinian entity alongside Israel. He owns a building in Rafah that houses his pharmacy along with a variety shop belonging to another brother, Khaled, and apartments for many of the clan's families. Moreover, Abdul-Aziz is part of a consortium of pharmacists and doctors who are establishing the first pharmaceutical factory in the Gaza Strip, in itself part of the nascent industrialization of the economy that is so vital to creating a viable Palestinian entity after decades of occupation.

Due to open this summer, the Middle East Company for Pharmaceutical Industries will employ 60 full-time workers and produce cough syrup, aspirin-like analgesics, and anti-diarrhea medicine. Designed by Israeli engineers, with whom Abdul-Aziz has met regularly, and based on international standards, the $2.5-million enterprise occupies a bright new building near the Israeli border and is gradually filling up with European and American equipment.

An Honest Respect For Israel's Success

Abdul-Aziz has also purchased several acres of farmland in southern Gaza where he and his family cultivate olives, wheat and almonds. His father, Ibrahim, spends a couple hours every day working the land and the family gathers there most Fridays for work and a picnic. He has begun building a small house on the site.

"I love land and it is good for my father to come here," he said one afternoon walking between the young olive trees, picking wheat stalks and offering their grains as a snack. "This way my children also learn the value of land. It reminds us of our roots. We like to work here together, irrigating and planting. We make olive oil and give it away to our cousins."

Abdul-Aziz also reveals admiration for what Israel has accomplished, implying an ability to coexist not evident from his other comments. The gap between his words and his feelings is not uncommon among the many Palestinians who regard Israel both as the source of their misfortunes and the best model for them in the region.

"The Israelis deserve what they have, in many ways," Abdul-Aziz said one evening. "Their democracy is one of their greatest strengths. They have developed a society that is more civilized than ours. We are still suffering from our lack of civilization. Israel has advanced science and we don't. We are ignorant. Israel is a part of the world. All the world supports Israel."

Foreign support for Israel is a complaint heard among the teachers at the middle school attended by his third child, Ibrahim, 15. Like his West Bank cousin, Ibrahim is founder and editor of a school newspaper. But in keeping with his more religious upbringing, he has named his "The Lamp of Al Aksa," a reference to the Jerusalem mosque viewed by Palestinians as their national symbol held illegally by Israel. His paper runs Koranic verses and editorials on defending the homeland.

The young were the mainstay of the uprising a decade ago, the so-called "Children of Stones." Many took to the streets and missed school. Today, the Palestinian Authority is seeking to re-educate that generation and repair the torn social fabric.

Ibrahim's school registry lists all pupils with their parents' town or village of origin from 1948, many of them no longer in existence, and the teachers instruct the youngsters never to forget their origins or their struggle to return.

Ibrahim, who says he wants to be a doctor, has never had a conversation with an Israeli aside from hostile exchanges with soldiers at checkpoints outside the Jewish settlements near his house. Some 4,000 heavily guarded and mostly religious Jews still live in Gaza, taking up a third of its land, a source of fierce local irritation. Ibrahim says he cannot imagine making friends with any Israeli.

Palestinian State Is 'All We Want'

The lives of the other Shikaki siblings are equally reflective of their society. The husbands of two sisters work in Israel in factories and under newly relaxed rules introduced last month often spend the night in Israel rather than returning each day.

A third sister, Leila, lives with the family of her husband, Nabil, who left his work in Israel to join the new armed police force established by Arafat four years ago, perhaps the most palpable symbol of Palestinian autonomy. The mother of five, Leila says the arrival of the Palestinian Authority has made life much safer. She no longer fears that Israeli soldiers will break in at night in search of suspects and the nightly curfews of past years are gone.

"All we want is our state in the West Bank and Gaza," she said, her 3-year-old daughter, Nibal, on her lap. "But of course, the most important is Jerusalem. Nothing is worth it if we can't have Jerusalem."

Leila's husband, Nabil, has a crisp blue uniform and an AK-47 semi-automatic rifle and sits contentedly at a checkpoint within the Gaza Strip watching cars as they pass near the newly built but unused airport. Israel has continued to oppose the opening of the airport on security grounds, still another issue of contention here. The Palestinian police also face the task of stopping Islamic militants who oppose Arafat's peace deal with Israel.

Despite their anger and religious bent, none of the younger Shikakis appear to have become active either in Islamic Holy War or its larger sister organization, Hamas, to which about a fifth of the population vows allegiance. Many young Shikakis say they long only for a state in Gaza and the West Bank. This is something Arafat asserts he will declare -- following Israel's example 50 years ago -- in May 1999, when the interim period in the peace process ends, if negotiations remain stalled.

This fits another new pattern -- Palestinians emulating Israel's tactics. There is now a vigorous debate in the Palestinian community as to whether it was a mistake not to have accepted the U.N. partition plan in 1947.

The young Shikakis profess an attachment to their father's old village but none have ever gone there. They seem intent, most of all, on rebuilding their shattered society in their new home.

Typical of this growing pragmatism was a comment by Abdul-Aziz's wife, Nima, who often expresses herself in militant terms. Asked about the moderation of her brother-in-law, Khalil, the political scientist, she said it was his Western education that made him different. She added, "I would be very happy to have all my children educated just like Khalil."

And Abdul-Aziz, offering one of his more radical assertions, caught himself. He insisted that he would give up all he owned in Gaza for "one square meter" of his family's ancestral land and the right to return there. Then he laughed and said, "I can dream, can't I?"

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