Mohamud Said Omar Is the Minnesota Somalia Aressted In The Netherlands

MINNEAPOLIS — A Somali man arrested in the Netherlands and accused of financing Islamic terrorists was not an extremist and was so poor he couldn't afford to bring his new wife from Somalia to the U.S., according to two of his brothers who live in Minnesota.

Mohamud Said Omar, 43, was arrested Sunday at an asylum seeker's center near Amsterdam and is being held at the request of American authorities.

The arrest is related to the FBI's investigation into the disappearance of up to 20 young Somali men who left the Twin Cities over the last two years for Somalia, presumed to have joined the terror group al-Shabaab. Dutch authorities said the U.S. has asked for Omar's extradition, which could take up to a year if he contests it.

Dutch prosecutors said U.S. investigators suspect him of bankrolling the purchase of weapons for Islamic militants and helping other Somalis travel to Somalia in 2007 and 2008.

Abdullahi Said Omar, Mohamud's younger brother in Minneapolis, and another brother, Mohamed Osman, said Mohamud worked low-paying jobs to make ends meet, and didn't have enough money to send to terrorists. They believe their brother is innocent.

"He was homeless, he didn't even have a place to stay," said Osman, 51, of Rochester, Minn.

Abdullahi said he and Mohamud left Somalia soon after graduating from high school and lived in a refugee camp in Kenya for a time, before moving to the U.S. in 1993, living first in Virginia and moving to Minnesota in 1999.

Omar traveled to Somalia in early 2008 to marry a woman there, Abdullahi said, but had not been able to scrape together enough money to bring her back home with him.

Mohamud returned to the U.S. after the wedding and got a job as a fruit truck driver to earn money to bring his wife to the U.S. He said Mohamud also worked on an assembly line for a time.

Omar left the U.S. in November 2008 to make a hajj pilgrimage to Mecca, Abdullahi said, then he went to the Netherlands. Abdullahi said his brother had tried unsuccessfully to get U.S. citizenship and that it was not a surprise he hadn't returned after his trip to Mecca.

Evan Kohlmann, a senior investigator with the NEFA (Nine Eleven Finding Answers) Foundation, which researches Islamic militants, said it was still possible for someone with limited means to help finance terrorist activities — especially in a place like Somalia, where one can live cheaply. Terror groups like al-Shabaab have learned that, he said.

"What these guys have discovered is, if you pool enough people together, even relatively meager personal resources can be marshalled in a way where you can have a fairly significant impact," he said.

Osman said he had not spoken to Mohamud for about a year, but that he was not as surprised as his brother to learn of Mohamud's arrest, saying Mohamud had worked as a janitor at the Abubakar As-Saddique Islamic Center, the largest mosque in Minnesota, and sometimes served as a driver for people that Osman suspects might have had ties to al-Shabaab in Somalia. Both brothers said Mohamud earned $800 a month working at the mosque.

He described his brother as highly open to suggestion from authority figures.

"I think my brother, what they are doing is scapegoating him," said Osman.

"He's the same like me — just normal," Abdullahi said. "We pray five times a day and follow our religion, but we are not extremists."

A person working in the mosque's main office this week declined to say anything about Mohamud or confirm he worked there. None of about 20 other people at the mosque approached by a reporter, both workers and citizens, would admit to knowing Mohamud or recognizing his name.

Details of Mohamud's case were sealed in the Netherlands under that nation's privacy laws, and U.S. authorities have declined to discuss the case except to confirm it is related to the Minneapolis investigation.

Omar's Dutch attorney, Audrey Kessels, told the daily newspaper De Volkskrant that because Omar had a U.S. green card, he was ineligible for asylum in the Netherlands and his request was quickly rejected.

She said he had appealed the decision on the basis of illness. Omar had told her he couldn't find work in America and "didn't have any peace in his head." Osman said his brother suffered from sleep problems and was often scared of other people.

"He didn't make a healthy impression," Kessels said.

At least three of the men who left the Minneapolis area have died, including one who carried out a suicide bombing in the semiautonomous Puntland region in October 2008. Three have pleaded guilty to terror-related charges in federal court in Minneapolis; a fourth has pleaded guilty to perjury, and a fifth has pleaded not guilty to lying to the FBI.

Somalia has not had a functioning government since 1991, when warlords overthrew a socialist dictator and then turned on each other, causing chaos in the African nation of 7 million.

Tens of thousands of Somalis resettled in Minnesota in the last two decades, and the state now has the largest Somali population in the United States. Abdullahi Said Omar owns and runs a discount store in a part of Minneapolis populated by many Somali immigrants.

Abdullahi said that his brother had called him from the Netherlands early Thursday morning on his cell phone while he was sleeping, and left a message that indicated he thought he could return to America.

"He said he's in the jail and he's doing well," Abdullahi said. "He said he thinks maybe they'll send him back here."


The Rest @ The Associated Press

Minnesota Mujahadeen

March 6 (Bloomberg)

-- Seven months ago, Mustafa Salat told his father he was taking his clothes to the laundromat near their apartment in St. Paul, Minnesota. He never returned.
Salat, 19, later called from his birthplace, Somalia, and said he was okay, though he wouldn’t discuss what he was doing in a country he left when he was one year old, according to his parents, Lul and Ali.

Salat’s parents, along with U.S. authorities, said they fear he and other young Somali-Americans from the Minneapolis-St. Paul area were recruited to train at terrorist camps and fight in Somalia’s civil war.

• Now, the Federal Bureau of Investigation is concerned those Somalis may return to the U.S., where they are citizens, and plot terrorist attacks.
• Those fears were heightened last week when Robert Mueller, the FBI director, said a Somali-American living in Minneapolis was “radicalized” in his hometown, went to Somalia and became the first known U.S. citizen to carry out a suicide bombing.

“I am like a dead person walking,” said Lul, 42, who asked that her last name not be used and spoke in Somali through an interpreter. She and her husband go to bed with the phone under the pillow, fearing bad news about their son, they said. “I am not sleeping,” Lul said.

FBI Interviews

The FBI said it has been interviewing relatives of the missing and monitoring other cities with large Somali populations such as Columbus, Ohio, and Seattle, for reports of disappearances.

The bureau wouldn’t comment on Salat or estimate the number of Somali-Americans who have disappeared. The FBI wouldn’t say whether those who went missing would face charges if they return.

• At least 17 young men have vanished during the past two years from the Minneapolis-St. Paul area and are believed to be in Somalia now, said Omar Jamal, executive director of the Somali Justice Advocacy Center in St. Paul, a legal-aid organization.
• Jonathan Evans, a counter-terrorism official in the U.K., recently raised concern in a newspaper interview that residents there had trained in camps in Somalia and had returned to Britain.
• The FBI won’t say whether any of the Somali-Americans have returned to the U.S.
• The FBI is concerned that there may be more Somalis who have disappeared and whose parents haven’t reported them as missing, said E.K. Wilson, a bureau spokesman in Minneapolis.

Senate Hearings

The disappearances also are raising concern among lawmakers. Joseph Lieberman, a Connecticut independent who heads the Senate homeland security panel, plans a hearing March 11 on recruitment efforts in the U.S. by Somali groups.

Somali-Americans have gone to Somalia and trained there in terrorism camps associated with the militant group al-Shabaab, or “the Youth,” which has ties to al-Qaeda, said a U.S. counter- terrorism official who spoke on condition of anonymity. Al- Shabaab was designated as a terrorist group last year by the U.S.

The official said al-Shabaab and al-Qaeda are closely connected and it is unclear which organization runs the Somali training camps.

U.S.-backed Ethiopian troops entered Somalia in 2006. Islamist and clan-based opposition militias began a guerrilla war against the Ethiopian occupation.

Ethiopian troops withdrew from Somalia in January after the occupation failed to end Somalia’s civil war, leaving much of the south of the country under the control of al-Shabaab.

Obama’s Inauguration

While al-Shabaab has focused its activities within Somalia, its aspirations may be expanding. The FBI investigated a possible threatened attack by the group that could have been directed at Washington, coinciding with President Barack Obama’s Jan. 20 inauguration.

The disappearances are worrisome because of the risk posed by citizens of the U.S. and U.K. who can travel freely and blend in with the population, terrorism analysts said.

“It’s a blinking yellow light that needs further attention before it deteriorates and becomes a dangerous opening for attack,” James Phillips, an analyst at the Heritage Foundation, a Washington public policy organization, said in an interview.

The recruiting in the U.S. “raises the question of whether these young men will one day come home, and, if so, what they might undertake here,” the FBI’s Mueller said in a Feb. 23 speech in Washington.

Suicide Bomber

Mueller flagged the case of Shirwa Ahmed, 27, who lived in Minneapolis before going to Somalia, where he carried out a suicide bombing in October that killed at least 30 people, according to news reports. Ahmed was a naturalized U.S. citizen.

For their part, Salat’s parents said they don’t know if their son is involved with al-Shabaab.

Lul and three other mothers or grandmothers of missing young men have formed a group attempting to make sure the disappearances are reported, and to ensure that if their children return, they won’t be held by authorities. Other parents may not have reported disappearances for fear their children will be targeted by law enforcement, or that family immigration violations may come to light, said Jamal, who helped organize the mothers.

“If he comes back, I’m afraid he will be arrested,” Lul said of her son. “We don’t want him to be victimized again.”

Salat, a high school student, often asked questions about the food eaten in Somalia, and about universities there, his father said. He talked about wanting to become a nurse or police officer in the U.S., never about returning to Somalia.

Salat left behind some clothes and books in Arabic on a shelf in a room with a bunk bed that he shared with his brother Zacharia, 17.

‘Indoctrinated’

Lul said someone “indoctrinated” her son, though she isn’t sure who persuaded him to travel to Somalia.

• Jamal said those he knows of who disappeared had attended a Minneapolis mosque, the Abubakar As-Saddique Islamic Center.
  
• Omar Hurre, director of the center, said the mosque played no role and that he has urged anyone with knowledge of what happened to come forward.
  
• “We don’t know where they picked up those ideas,” Hurre said in an interview. “Attending the mosque programs does not in any way, shape or form mean we had anything to do with this.”

Even so, he said the mosque’s imam and a leader of its youth group were placed on the U.S. government’s no-fly list, preventing them from traveling to Mecca. Amy Kudwa, a Department of Homeland Security spokeswoman, said the department doesn’t comment on those on the no-fly list.

Another member of the mothers’ group, Fadumo Elmi, said through an interpreter that her grandson, Mahamoud Hassan, 18, disappeared in November. In the days before he disappeared, Hassan brought Elmi money to help pay for clothes and shoes for an Islamic celebration, she said.

Hassan called Elmi from Somalia last month. She told him to come back. He said he couldn’t, Elmi said. He also wouldn’t answer questions about what he was doing in Somalia.

“His mind was taken by something we don’t know,” said Elmi, as she wiped away tears using her head covering. “They forced him out of my hand.”

To contact the reporter on this story: Justin Blum in St. Paul, Minnesota at jblum4@bloomberg.net