Author: James Gordon Meek
Publication: Daily News
Date: July 8, 2006
URL: http://www.nydailynews.com/front/story/433448p-365170c.html
The alleged ringleader of the tunnel terror
plot lived the life of an international playboy - on orders from Al Qaeda.
Assem Hammoud, 31, even fooled his mother,
if Lebanese police and U.S. anti-terror officials are correct.
His mother, Nabila Qotob, said Hammoud drinks
alcohol, had girlfriends, traveled widely and showed no similarities to Islamic
militants.
She also said Hammoud taught economics at
a local university.
To prove her son was no jihadi, Qotob showed
off photos yesterday of Hammoud with his father and lounging shirtless on
a speeding motorboat in Germany.
There were also very un-Islamic pictures of
Hammoud with three smiling women - none of them wearing veils - on his arm
during an undated stay in Canada.
"His morale is high because he is confident
he is innocent," said Qotob, who said she had recently visited her son
in jail.
But Lebanese police, who arrested Hammoud
on April 27, said in a statement that the suspect claimed he had been ordered
to maintain a fun-loving, secular lifestyle to hide his Islamic militancy.
"He did just that with perfection,"
the police statement said.
Counterterror agents knew Hammoud by his Internet
alias of Amir Andalousli and consider him a dedicated member of Al Qaeda.
"We questioned him and he unraveled the
plot," a source said.
FBI Assistant Director Mark Mershon said,
"We know that he has acknowledged pledging a bayat or allegiance to Osama
Bin Laden, and he proclaims himself to be a member of Al Qaeda."
Hammoud also told his captors that he was
acting "on a religious order from Bin Laden and said, 'I am proud to
carry out his orders,' " a Lebanese official said.
To carry out those orders, Hammoud planned
to go to Pakistan for four months for training and had already undergone some
light weapons instruction with a Syrian man who came to Lebanon this year,
Lebanese cops said.
The Lebanese government said that instruction
took place in the Ein Alhulwa camp, a Palestinian refugee camp that Middle
East expert Nimrod Raphaeli called "an incubator of terrorism and a fountainhead
of Islamist extremism."
Hammoud wouldn't be the first Islamic terrorist
to live the good life to fool possible investigators.
Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, believed to be the
mastermind of the 9/11 plot, had developed a reputation as a charming womanizer
even as he plotted to blow up airplanes flying to the U.S. from Asia.
And some of the 9/11 attackers were known
to frequent topless bars and pay for lap dances to keep their covers from
being blown.
