theSun | FRIDAY OCTOBER 30 2009
news without borders
Leader of radical
group killed by FBI
CHICAGO: The leader of a
radical group who allegedly
preached violence against the
government to his mostly Af-
rican American followers was
shot and killed on Wednesday
in an FBI raid near Detroit.
The FBI said it employed
“special safeguards” to secure
the safe arrest of 11 men ac-
cused of operating an organ-
ised crime ring in the Detroit
area who were known to have
“espoused the use of violence
against law enforcement.”
But Luqman Abdullah,
53, refused to surrender and
began firing when he was
confronted in a warehouse in
Dearborn, Michigan, the FBI
said in a statement.
Luqman was killed during
the exchange of gunfire but
nobody else was hurt, an FBI
spokeswoman said.
An FBI criminal com-
plaint described Luqman as
a “highly placed leader of a
nationwide radical funda-
mentalist Sunni group con-
sisting primarily of African
Americans, some of whom
converted to Islam while they
were servicing sentences in
various prisons.”
The FBI monitored Luq-
man for years with the help
of informants who brought
back taped conversations and
stories of how he used the
mosque to train his followers
for a violent jihad.
Luqman often boasted of
killing police officers and of
his plans to “take out the US
government,” the FBI said in
a 45-page charge sheet.
He also spoke of his will-
ingness to die for his cause
and yelled in one sermon “do
not carry a pistol if you’re go-
ing to give it up to police. You
give them a bullet,” it said.
Even the children were
trained in martial arts, the
informants said, and evidence
of a shooting range was found
in the basement when the
congregation was evicted by
the city of Detroit for non-
payment of property taxes in
January.
Their primary mission
was to establish a separate,
sovereign Islamic state within
the borders of the United
States that would be ruled by
their spiritual leader, former
Black Panther Jamil Abdullah
al-Amin, who is currently in
jail for shooting two police
officers. – AFP
Afghan, Pakistan carnage
raises heat on Obama
WASHINGTON: Carnage in
Pakistan and America’s bloodiest
month in Afghanistan are sharp-
ening President Barack Obama’s
dilemma on troop deployments
while stoking political demands for
swifter action.
“We watch this situation
thesun continue to deteriorate while this
says: long protracted process of deci-
Table sion making goes on,” Republican
Senator John McCain told CBS on
anti-war Wednesday.
resolutions “We are not operating in a vac-
pg 15 uum. The president of the United
States needs to make this decision
and soon. Our allies are nervous
and our military leadership is be-
coming frustrated.”
The White House counters that
Obama’s soul searching is justi-
fied by the gravity of his choice on
whether to plunge tens of thousands
of people into the worsening war.
“I don’t think the American
people agree with Senator McCain
on that,” Obama spokesman Robert
Gibbs said. “I think it’s important to
hear and to get this right.”
Already fragile US public opinion
on the war is being tested by a rush
of recent casualties in Afghanistan,
with October the bloodiest month
for American troops of the eight-
year conflict so far.
Vicious bombings in Pakistan
– the latest killing 105 people in a
Peshawar market on Wednesday
– are meanwhile stirring new fears
of instability and concern for the
US-allied government in Islama-
bad.
The Peshawar bombing erupted
hours after the start of a visit to
Pakistan by Secretary of State Hil-
lary Clinton, who vowed the United
States would stand “shoulder to
shoulder” with Pakistan’s people in
the anti-terror struggle.
But the fraud-tainted Afghan
election, political manoeuvring
over the run-off, and a brazen
Taliban attack on a UN compound
in Kabul which killed eight people
will hardly stem skepticism of the
US Afghan mission. Republicans
13
see the turmoil of recent days as a
sign Obama must honour war com-
mander Gen Stanley McChrystal’s
request for 40,000 more troops.
But Democratic Senator Russ
Feingold spoke for many war op-
ponents when he said he wanted
success in Afghanistan but not at
any price.
“The national security and the
individual security to the American
people is the most important issue
to me,” Feingold told MSNBC.
Outwardly, Obama, who prides
himself on thriving under pressure,
appears unphased by the quicken-
ing crisis, scheduling the next meet-
ing of his exhaustive policy review
with US military chiefs on Friday.
On Tuesday, he told servicemen
and women in Florida he would
not “rush” a decision on which
lives depend.
Aides say no one takes the duty
of ordering troops to war more seri-
ously than Obama, as he must sign
condolence letters to families of the
fallen. – AFP