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Authors: Steve Hendricks
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the town’s mosque and where he began to preach, apparently as a lay imam. From time to time he visited cities in the North. Milan did not exactly enchant him, but its Muslim community was large, many of its members were fervent, and he knew the imam of one of the city’s largest mosques, a Gamaa man named Abu Imad, with whom he had been imprisoned in Egypt.
In the summer of 2000 he left Latina and settled in Milan. For an Islamist who had fled Egypt, worked for Islam in Peshawar, and been suspected of terrorism in Albania, it was not an innocuous time to go to Milan. Indeed, at that particular moment, Abu Omar could almost have settled in a training camp in Kandahar with less suspicion.
Chapter 3
The Enemy Within
IN FEBRUARY of 1993 a Pakistani-Kuwaiti named Ramzi Yousef, who had come to the United States on a plea of political asylum and was at large pending a hearing on his plea, blew up a Ryder truck filled with fertilizer under the north tower of the World Trade Center. He was driven by a loathing of American sponsorship of Israel on the one hand and the brutal semi-secular regimes of the Middle East on the other. He had hoped to topple the north tower into its twin and bring down both in a hail of death—an outcome that would have to wait eight years and other attackers—but he succeeded in killing six, injuring more than a thousand, and, unintentionally, impelling the police of Milan to take a closer look at the deranged Islam in their midst.
Yousef, it turned out, was a disciple of Omar Abdel-Rahman, known as the Blind Sheikh, who was perhaps the preeminent leader-in-exile of Gamaa. The Blind Sheikh had been expelled from Egypt for issuing fatwas condoning terrorism and had spent time among the mujahidin of Pakistan and the terrorists of Sudan. At one time he counted among his friends Ayman al-Zawahiri and Osama bin Laden. In 1990 he settled in the United States, notwithstanding that he was on the State Department’s terrorist watch list. “We must be terrorists,” he told a Brooklyn audience a few weeks before the Trade Center bombing. “We must terrorize the enemies of Islam to frighten them and disturb them and shake the earth under their feet.” While Yousef plotted to blow up the Trade Center, the Blind Sheikh conspired to blow up the headquarters of the United Nations and bridges and tunnels into Manhattan. He was arrested in 1993, tried in 1995, and elected by a dozen infidels to life membership in an institution of correction. Yousef had by then fled to Pakistan, from which he advanced a plot with his uncle, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the future evil genius of the September 11 attacks, to blow up several airliners over the Pacific Ocean. Instead, Yousef was caught in Islamabad and extradited to New York, where he too received the sentence of a lifetime.
The FBI’s investigation of Yousef and the Blind Sheikh turned up a tangle of connections between their cell in greater New York and fanatics abroad. Among the connections were phone calls to Milan. The calls would have been interesting in any case, but they were the more so because Yousef sometimes traveled on a falsified Italian passport. The men on the Milan end of the calls were parishioners of the Islamic Cultural Institute, which was the formal name of the mosque on Viale Jenner that Abu Omar would later frequent. The mosque had been founded only a few years before the Trade Center bombing, in 1988, by one Ibrahim Saad, a devotee of the Blind Sheikh and another Egyptian whose commitment to Gamaa had made him unwelcome at home. On coming to Italy, Saad had been frustrated that Milan, unlike other large cities in Europe, had no correspondingly large mosque and that its small mosques lacked the proper zeal. He got a stake from an Islamic businessman—an Eritrean named Idris Ahmed Nasreddin, who had become rich in Milan and Switzerland and whom the U.S. Treasury Department would later declare, for a time, a financier of terrorists—and opened
In the summer of 2000 he left Latina and settled in Milan. For an Islamist who had fled Egypt, worked for Islam in Peshawar, and been suspected of terrorism in Albania, it was not an innocuous time to go to Milan. Indeed, at that particular moment, Abu Omar could almost have settled in a training camp in Kandahar with less suspicion.
Chapter 3
The Enemy Within
IN FEBRUARY of 1993 a Pakistani-Kuwaiti named Ramzi Yousef, who had come to the United States on a plea of political asylum and was at large pending a hearing on his plea, blew up a Ryder truck filled with fertilizer under the north tower of the World Trade Center. He was driven by a loathing of American sponsorship of Israel on the one hand and the brutal semi-secular regimes of the Middle East on the other. He had hoped to topple the north tower into its twin and bring down both in a hail of death—an outcome that would have to wait eight years and other attackers—but he succeeded in killing six, injuring more than a thousand, and, unintentionally, impelling the police of Milan to take a closer look at the deranged Islam in their midst.
Yousef, it turned out, was a disciple of Omar Abdel-Rahman, known as the Blind Sheikh, who was perhaps the preeminent leader-in-exile of Gamaa. The Blind Sheikh had been expelled from Egypt for issuing fatwas condoning terrorism and had spent time among the mujahidin of Pakistan and the terrorists of Sudan. At one time he counted among his friends Ayman al-Zawahiri and Osama bin Laden. In 1990 he settled in the United States, notwithstanding that he was on the State Department’s terrorist watch list. “We must be terrorists,” he told a Brooklyn audience a few weeks before the Trade Center bombing. “We must terrorize the enemies of Islam to frighten them and disturb them and shake the earth under their feet.” While Yousef plotted to blow up the Trade Center, the Blind Sheikh conspired to blow up the headquarters of the United Nations and bridges and tunnels into Manhattan. He was arrested in 1993, tried in 1995, and elected by a dozen infidels to life membership in an institution of correction. Yousef had by then fled to Pakistan, from which he advanced a plot with his uncle, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the future evil genius of the September 11 attacks, to blow up several airliners over the Pacific Ocean. Instead, Yousef was caught in Islamabad and extradited to New York, where he too received the sentence of a lifetime.
The FBI’s investigation of Yousef and the Blind Sheikh turned up a tangle of connections between their cell in greater New York and fanatics abroad. Among the connections were phone calls to Milan. The calls would have been interesting in any case, but they were the more so because Yousef sometimes traveled on a falsified Italian passport. The men on the Milan end of the calls were parishioners of the Islamic Cultural Institute, which was the formal name of the mosque on Viale Jenner that Abu Omar would later frequent. The mosque had been founded only a few years before the Trade Center bombing, in 1988, by one Ibrahim Saad, a devotee of the Blind Sheikh and another Egyptian whose commitment to Gamaa had made him unwelcome at home. On coming to Italy, Saad had been frustrated that Milan, unlike other large cities in Europe, had no correspondingly large mosque and that its small mosques lacked the proper zeal. He got a stake from an Islamic businessman—an Eritrean named Idris Ahmed Nasreddin, who had become rich in Milan and Switzerland and whom the U.S. Treasury Department would later declare, for a time, a financier of terrorists—and opened
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