Word: abohalima
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Dates: during 1993-1993
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There is some doubt as to whether the brother is speaking the truth. Mahmud Abohalima, according to his lawyer, did indeed return to his parents' house on March 13. But before he had spent a day there, he was captured, spirited away and last week handed over to American authorities as the latest and most impressive trophy in the uncannily successful hunt for the perpetrators of the Feb. 26 bombing of the World Trade Center...
Last Thursday authorities paraded five of their six prime suspects -- Abohalima, Bilal Alkaisi, Mohammed Salameh, Nidal Ayyad and Ibrahim Elgabrowny -- into the U.S. District Court building in Manhattan's Foley Square. All five pleaded not guilty to charges related to the bombing. Ayyad, a chemical engineer, said, "I swear on the Koran, my wife, my children and my family and all I hold dear to me that I am not guilty and had nothing to do with this." The denials of the defendants notwithstanding, FBI and police investigators felt they had apprehended the core members of the terrorist conspiracy. Wider...
...puzzle had seemed less complete just a few days earlier, a condition best symbolized by the figure of Abohalima himself, or rather by his absence. The investigation had already yielded three imprisoned suspects, a cache of bomb-making chemicals, and the beginnings of a money trail. But it had not produced a ringleader; someone not quite "the John Gotti of this group," as a New York sleuth told New York Newsday, but the "guy ((who)) runs the crew...
...Abohalima seemed to fit that profile. Having come to the United States via Germany and attained permanent alien status as a "farmworker" under a 1986 immigration law, the 6-ft. 4-in., 240-lb. redhead had in reality toiled as a cabbie -- a crooked one, his former boss suggested. He journeyed to Afghanistan in the late '80s to fight as a member of the Islamic, antigovernment mujahedin. More to the point, he was close to Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, the fiery blind Muslim preacher whose fundamentalist sermons may have inspired the alleged bombers. Abohalima acted as the sheik's driver...
...airline ticket. Shortly before Mohammed Salameh, the renter of the fatal Ryder van, was arrested, Abohalima literally took flight. Some thought to South Africa; others to Pakistan. One official merely lamented, "He's been lost track of. God knows where...