Author: Andrew Stern
Publication: Compuserve News
Date: June 10, 2002
Abdullah al Muhajir, a U.S. citizen
of Puerto Rican descent, had an extensive criminal record, including committing
murder at age 13, long before being arrested as a suspected al Qaeda operative
in an alleged plot to detonate a radioactive "dirty bomb," authorities
said.
Muhajir, 31, was a street gang member
in Chicago who got into trouble with the law early and often, law enforcement
officials said. He spent time in juvenile detention in the 1980s in Chicago
with a murder conviction, and was behind bars in Florida in the early 1990s
in connection with an assault charge, the officials said.
Authorities said Muhajir left the
United States in 1998 from Florida. He was born Jose Padilla, a Latino
of Puerto Rican background, on Oct. 18, 1970, in New York. He later changed
his name. His family arrived in Chicago four years later, authorities said,
and he began committing crimes as a youth. Muhajir was convicted of a gangland-style
murder he committed at age 13, and was confined to Chicago's juvenile detention
facility in 1985, authorities said. He attended grammar school while incarcerated,
Chicago school officials said.
He spent 10 months in a Florida
jail awaiting trial on a 1991 assault, pleading guilty in Broward County
in August 1992 to charges of discharging a firearm and aggravated assault,
officials in Florida said. He was sentenced to serve one year of probation.
Padilla was believed to have converted
to Islam while incarcerated. When or how he was recruited into Saudi-born
militant Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda guerrilla network -- blamed by the
United States for the Sept. 11 attack that killed more than 3,000 people
-- was not divulged by authorities.
He was arrested on May 8 at Chicago's
O'Hare International Airport by federal agents tracking him on a flight
from Pakistan, authorities said. Law enforcement officials said his arrest
foiled a potential attack with a dirty bomb, possibility in Washington,
although some officials said the plot was not fully developed.
"He doesn't seem to have the wherewithal
to carry out a complicated plot to plant a radioactive device, but maybe
the lesson here is that (al Qaeda) doesn't have to import terrorists, they
can be recruited right here," said Tom Kirkpatrick of the Chicago Crime
Commission, a group that studies organized crime including street gangs.
A dirty bomb is a conventional explosive device wrapped in or laced with
radioactive material. It is not an actual nuclear bomb, but its explosion
could spread radioactive material.
Muhajir would not bew the first
street gang member recruited for a larger criminal task. Long-time Chicago
gang leader Jeff Fort -- whose gang adopted some of the trappings of Islam
-- was convicted of trying to buy a missile to blow up a federal building
or police station in a 1980s-era plot, supposedly on instructions from
Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi.
