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Abdulhakim Muhammad

Abdulhakim Muhammad, 23, of Little Rock, right, appears with his attorney Stephen Thomas in a Little Rock, Ark., courtroom Tuesday, June 2, 2009, where he was charged in the Monday death of a military recruiter. AP Photo/Danny Johnston

 

By Frank James

The lawyer for the alleged shooter of two soldiers at a recruiting station in Little Rock, Ark. this week has an unusual theory for why his client is in so much trouble. He went over to the dark side when he was imprisoned with Yemeni terrorists for a visa violation.

An AP excerpt:

Lawyer Jim Hensley described Abdulhakim Muhammad as an impressionable youth driven to public service in an impoverished Middle Eastern country. But teachings by "hardened" terrorists in Yemen and experiences with Afghan child refugees missing limbs drove him to become someone his parents didn't recognize, Hensley said.


"Here comes the FBI, who may be able to help this guy or save his life, and then they leave and then he's got to go back in with these hardened terrorists. He's got to survive, how do you live with that?" Hensley said. "He absolutely feels that the FBI and anyone else associated with the United States government left him to the wolves, that's for certain."

Muhammad, 23, who was formerly known as Carlos Bledsoe, is from Little Rock. There's definitely an interesting story to be dug out by reporters on how a young man from Little Rock winds up locked up in Yemen.

More from the Associated Press:

Hensley said Muhammad was a student at a college in Tennessee and left early to pursue volunteer work teaching English to children in Yemen. The lawless and impoverished country on the tip of the Arabian peninsula - also the ancestral home of Osama bin Laden's family - was the scene to one of al-Qaida's most dramatic pre-9/11 attacks, the 2000 suicide bombing of the destroyer USS Cole off the Aden coast that killed 17 American sailors.


While in Yemen, Hensley said Muhammad married a woman and converted to Islam. Police detained him after his visa expired, Hensley said. A law enforcement official previously told the AP that Muhammad was arrested and jailed for using a Somali passport. Hensley said he knew nothing about his client using a Somali passport.

If you're a law enforcement or homeland security official, you'd have to be very concerned by what we know so far about Muhammad's story.

Here was a young man who for some reason decides to go to Yemen of all places. He's arrested for some reason and placed in a Yemeni jail, perhaps for having a Somali passport.

He converts to Islam at some point and returns to the U.S. where he seems to be a different person to his parents and probably others who knew him earlier in life.

Yet, there's no indication that this individual, who arguably has the profile of a one-man sleeper cell, was on the radar screen of law enforcement or homeland security.

It makes you wonder: are there other individuals out there with similar stories and, if so, how many? Was he even on the Homeland Security Department's no-fly list?

No doubt authorities are clearly asking themselves some of the same questions.

According to another AP story:

A joint FBI-Homeland Security intelligence assessment said officers found maps to Jewish organizations, a child care center, a Baptist church, a post office, and military recruiting centers in the Southeast and in New York and Philadelphia.


``Out of an abundance of caution, and in light of newly discovered information, the FBI cannot rule out additional subjects, targets, or the potential for inspired copycats who might act out in support of the original act,'' the assessment said.


Abdulhakim Muhammad, 23, of Little Rock, had targeted soldiers ``because of what they had done to Muslims in the past,'' authorities said, saying he had said he wanted to ``kill as many people in the Army as he could.''

categories: Crime

8:19 - June 4, 2009

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