Free Republic

NEW YORK, USA (UPI): Relatives and friends said the four men arrested in an alleged plot to bomb jet fuel tanks at Kennedy International Airport in New York were wrongly accused. "The man is no extremist," Rudy Thorne, a lifelong friend of Abdel Nur in Guyana told the Friday's Miami Herald. Another suspect, Kareem Ibrahim, told a friend in Trinidad that his Shiite branch of Islam meant peace, not overthrowing governments, Wendell Eversley, the friend, told the newspaper. The Herald said the four suspects -- Nur, Ibrahim, Abdul Kadir, and Russell Defreitas -- are black converts to Islam and three...

Trinidadian police tell The Associated Press that Abdel Nur, a Guyanese suspect in an alleged plot to attack New York's John F. Kennedy Airport, has surrendered. The news comes a day after surveillance video was released of one of the suspects in the terror plot targeting the airport, taken just minutes before his arrest. In the video, the accused mastermind of the terror plot is seen leaving a diner shortly before his arrest. Eyewitness News reporter Jeff Rossen takes a closer look. In the diner surveillance tape, obtained by Eyewitness News, you can see the alleged ring leader and a...

PORT OF SPAIN, Trinidad, June 9 — One senior member of this island’s most hard-line Islamic group said he loves American television and hopes to send his son off to university in the States. Another said that when he is not praying or preaching, he plays in a steel drum band. Denying that their group, Jamaat al Muslimeen, was tied to any plot to bomb a New York City airport, members this week portrayed themselves as both Islamists and islanders, devoted to God but also part of the multicultural mix that defines the Caribbean nation of Trinidad and Tobago.Even as...

Saudia Kadir Was Arrested On An Unrelated Weapons Possession Charge (CBS/AP) GEORGETOWN, Guyana -- The daughter of a man accused of plotting to blow up John F. Kennedy International Airport fuel lines is free on U.S. $50 bond following her unrelated detention on suspicion of weapons possession. Sauda Kadir told The Associated Press early Sunday that police detained her after they saw photos taken last Christmas showing family members posing with toy guns. Kadir, 31, said she did not know how police obtained the pictures and declined further comment. She was ordered to appear Tuesday at police headquarters for further...

The thing that caught our eye in the plot to blow up John F. Kennedy International Airport and its oil lines concerns a detail in respect of the arrest of one of the key Guyanese suspects. It was the fact that the former member of the Guyanese legislature who was fingered in the plot, Abdul Kadir, was arrested in Trinidad on his way to Caracas, Venezuela. According to Mr. Kadir's wife, who was quoted in the Guyanese press, he was there to pick up an Iranian visa that would enable him to attend an Islamic conference in Tehran. No doubt...

The twin-island Caribbean nation of Trinidad and Tobago would seem to be the last place to raise alarm bells over the threat of radical Islam. Trinidad was briefly catapulted into the spotlight in June 2007 when reports surfaced that one of the suspects linked to an alleged plot to attack New York City’s John F. Kennedy International Airport was a Trinidadian national and that the suspects reached out to Yasin Abu Bakr, the leader of Jamaat al-Muslimeen (JAM, Association of Muslims), for assistance in executing their plan. JAM is an enigmatic Trinidadian Muslim militant group that is implicated in violence,...

The investigation into the thwarted plot to bomb John F. Kennedy International Airport is widening beyond the four men in custody, with more suspects sought outside the U.S. for their suspected roles, a law enforcement official said Friday. The defendants identified last weekend were "just a piece of it," the official told The Associated Press on the condition of anonymity because of not being authorized to speak publicly. "We are definitely seeking more players. We are targeting others overseas." The official declined to provide details about the possible suspects, or in what countries they are being sought. Law enforcement officials,...

I have been only mildly irritated by reports on the alleged plot to blow up JFK Airport which suggest that the unusual suspects in this case were simply too broke and stupid to pull it off. But I’ve been positively incensed by the fact that some of those reports were written by Caribbean natives who posited this condescending notion in a misguided attempt to express the shame and mitigate the guilt they presume we all feel. The Caribbean-American community in New York is understandably upset, embarrassed and miffed over the weekend revelations that four immigrants from the Caribbean, one of...

(CBS/AP) NEW YORK -- The question was simple: “Would you like to die as a martyr?” The putative terrorist unhesitatingly replied yes—there was no greater way to die in Islam. The right answer put the man in the midst of a terrorist plot conceived as more devastating than the 9/11 attacks. He was soon making surveillance trips around John F. Kennedy International Airport—the “chicken farm,” as the planners dubbed their target -- and visiting the Trinidad compound of a radical Muslim group. On Saturday, the insider—a twice-convicted drug dealer—was revealed as a government informant whose surreptitious work undermined a plot...

Four men including former PNCR Member of Parliament Abdul Kadir were yesterday charged by United States law enforcement officials with allegedly conspiring to blow up the John F Kennedy International airport as well as tanks storing aviation fuel and underground fuel pipelines. Those charged with Kadir are former JFK worker Russell Defreitas, a Guyanese-born US citizen; Kareem Ibrahim, an imam from Trinidad; and Guyanese Abdel Nur. Kadir and Ibrahim were arrested in Trinidad, while Defreitas was held in New York. Up to press time, however, Nur had not been apprehended and was thought to be still at large in Trinidad....