Portland terrorism arrest: Man allegedly helped by Khan was a world apart, in more ways than one
By Kimberly A.C. Wilson, The Oregonian
on March 09 2013
The email exchange at the heart of a high-profile Portland terrorism case makes Reaz Qadir Khan and Ali Jaleel sound like old friends. Jaleel is said to mention past promises the two had made together. Khan is quoted growing wistful for "everything that we used to talk about."
Ali Jaleel, also known as Mus'ab Sayyid, in a video crediting him for a suicide attack in Lahore, Pakistan that killed roughly 30 people and wounded hundreds more.
But the dialogue described by prosecutors leaves a key question unanswered. What forged the alleged bond, which prosecutors portray as close and longstanding, between a middle-aged engineer in the Pacific Northwest and a young man from an island in the Indian Ocean?
On one side was Khan, a Pakistan native who earned a master's degree in New Jersey and spent most of his adult life in the United States. On the other was Jaleel, a mujahedeen roughly 15 years Khan's junior from the archipelago nation of the Maldives.
At the time of the first email in the indictment, Dec. 14, 2005 , Khan was 41 and had just started a job at a city wastewater treatment plant in Portland after working for several California companies as an engineer. Jaleel was in his 20s and on the verge of one in a series of arrests nearly 9,000 miles to the west.
Federal prosecutors allege the pair's correspondence would culminate with Khan sending Jaleel $2,450 to prepare for a 2009 armed assault in Pakistan that left roughly 30 people dead, including Jaleel and his fellow attackers. Khan, now 48 , pleaded not guilty last week and is free pending trial.
If the government knows the source of the relationship described in the two men's correspondence, it is not saying.
Island nation
First, the where.
The Maldives ("Mall-deevs" ), a group of more than 1,000 small islands, most just few steps above sea level, is South Asia's Cinderella story.
The island chain was the region's poorest country as recently as the 1980s. Then a trickle of European tourists discovered its shifting, opalescent waters and pearl-colored sands southwest of India.
"Now, it is the richest country in South Asia," said Jeffrey Lunstead, professor of international studies and diplomat-in-residence at Middlebury College in Vermont.
As the U.S. ambassador to Sri Lanka and the Maldives between 2003 and 2006, Lunstead traveled frequently to the islands. Home to about 400,000 people of South Indian, Sinhalese and Arab descent, the Maldives maintained a reputation as a conservative Sunni Muslim country even as it became known for discreet honeymoon holidays.
The 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami flooded more than two-thirds of the nation's capital city, Malé, drawing attention to the impacts of rising sea levels and global warming. Experts in radical Islam point also to the tsunami as the moment a tide of religious neo-fundamentalism washed ashore.
Displays of domestic Islamic radicalism, though rare, began to increase.
In 2005, Islamists attacked a shop in Malé displaying Santa Claus.
Two years later, a dozen Chinese, Japanese and British tourists were wounded in a bombing at Sultan Park, described in Lonely Planet guidebooks as "the nicest public space in Malé."
Officers and soldiers responded to the bombing by laying siege to a mosque on the island of Himandhoo, where radicalism had frightened local resorts from sending tourists. Sharia law was in place, and fundamentalists armed with swords and iron rods had recently kidnapped a local policeman.
A spokesman for the Maldives government, Mohammed Shareef, told a British newspaper at the time that officials blamed the rising fundamentalism in part on groups of Maldivians travelling to Pakistan and falling under the spell of radical imams.
One man who would become a target of the government's growing concern was Ali Jaleel.
Jaleel
Jaleel was the youngest of eight children, according to an article in the Maldives newspaper Miadhu News six months after his death.
His older brother Ibrahim, described as a noted volleyball coach, told the newspaper that Jaleel attended Majeediyya School in the capital of Malé. He described Jaleel as fluent in English and Arabic.
Like many of his classmates interested in education beyond high school, Jaleel studied abroad. His brother said he went on for "higher studies" in Pakistan.
Jaleel took his religion seriously and talked often about political issues affecting the Middle East, his brother said, but he wasn't a radical.
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"My brother talked about these issues just as most Maldivians talked about it," Ibrahim Jaleel told Miadhu News. "But he never expressed a fundamentalist opinion of these matters when he was in Malé."
Between 2006 and 2008, Maldivian authorities and Sri Lankan intelligence agents tracked Jaleel's movements from the Maldives to Sri Lanka, on to Qatar and into the tribal areas of Pakistan, where would-be jihadists train.
In 2006, according to local news reports, authorities pegged Jaleel as the senior member of a group arrested at a Sri Lanka airport while awaiting a flight to Qatar. He was imprisoned briefly on terrorism-training charges, according to The Hindu newspaper.
But he was freed within months, performing a marriage on foreign soil for a man described as an already-married 20-year-old "disciple" of Jaleel's, according to the Haveeru Daily News in the Maldives. The Maldivian Attorney General's office found the ceremony lacked proper documentation and violated Maldivian law concerning marriages performed abroad.
Tried in criminal court in Malé, Jaleel was found guilty of teaching Islam without permission. He was also convicted of spreading ideas about the pilgrimage to Mecca and the concept of jihad that were not approved by the Supreme Council for Islamic Affairs in the Maldives. Jaleel was sentenced to two years of house arrest.
Just as his sentence was about to end, he was accused of violating it. Authorities in 2008 sentenced him to four months of "banishment," according to the BBC.
Several times during those years, U.S. prosecutors say, Jaleel communicated with Khan, who was living in Portland. In October 2008, according to Khan's federal indictment, they began discussing Jaleel's plans to leave the Maldives for a terrorist training camp in Pakistan.
Jaleel told one of his wives that Khan was like a brother to him , according to the federal indictment. Their email exchange indicates Jaleel was about to press that relationship.
The Lahore attack
The excerpts presented by prosecutors portray Jaleel making some specific requests of Khan as he prepared for his journey to Pakistan, with Khan offering logistical help.
The indictment says Jaleel wanted money to pay for admission to the training camp, help in concealing his intentions from his family and assistance caring for his wives afterward.
Khan agreed to send him cash, prosecutors say, and arranged for Jaleel to pick up the money from a third party in Pakistan. He advised Jaleel to buy separate inbound and outbound tickets for his journey into the country, so that the unused return ticket could be redeemed for cash.
Their last communication shown in the indictment came Nov. 5, 2008, when Khan offered to expedite the wives' travel to Pakistan.
Six months later, on May 27, 2009 , gunmen drove a van up to the Inter Services Intelligence offices in Lahore. They unleashed a hail of gunfire before detonating a bomb inside the van that caused a massive blast. Some 30 people were killed, Jaleel and two accomplices among them. Another 300 were injured.
Khan wired $750 to Jaleel's two wives the following week, according to the indictment, using Western Union at a Tigard Fred Meyer. The dead fighter from the Maldives left two daughters and a son under age nine.
A martyr video surfaced some months later on the Web under the banner of As-Sahab, Al-Qaeda's media arm. In November 2009, Jaleel's family confirmed the bearded man flanked by long guns and taking credit for the attack was him. He was 30 when he died, according to local news accounts.
Evan Kohlmann, a terrorism expert and on-air analyst for NBC News, said Jaleel's video appearance speaks to his significance to leaders of the movement. As-Sahab has ties to the highest levels of Al-Qaeda leadership, he said.
It "certainly indicates that he made it on somebody's radar screen," Kohlmann told The Oregonian. "If you get featured in a video produced by As-Sahab, that's pretty much primetime. You become a celebrity in the underground world of violent jihad."
A few weeks after Jaleel's video was authenticated, another video appeared featuring a little-known Al-Qaeda cell operating in the Maldives. The video showed three men sitting on a beach with a fourth posed near a coconut tree.
A message flashed, "Your brothers in the Maldives are calling you."
Noelle Crombie of The Oregonian staff contributed to this report.
-- Kimberly A.C. Wilson
