Word: abouhalima
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...Abouhalima's training site was the frontier city of Peshawar in Pakistan, near the Afghan border, where the major mujahedin parties had their headquarters and where more than 50 Arab relief agencies and unofficial groups had offices. The mujahedin received an estimated $3.5 billion in financial support from the CIA as well, which bankrolled training for the Muslim warriors in the use of explosives and modern weapons. Abouhalima settled in one of the many transit houses known as the House of Friends, where young Arabs were often crammed four to a room...
...their Afghan brothers, who sensed that the volunteers had a wider agenda. Even so, their zeal in combat amazed even the fearless Afghans. "The Arabs were crazy fighters, charging into any fire," recalls Ahmed Muwafak Zaidan, a Syrian writer who covered the war. An Egyptian scholar in Pakistan remembers Abouhalima and conspiracy defendant Siddig Ibrahim Siddig Ali as "very good commanders who fought in various provinces" of Afghanistan...
...time he returned from Afghanistan in July 1990, Abouhalima was in his radical prime. (Sheik Omar arrived the same month, probably by coincidence.) Neighbors recall Abouhalima wearing fatigues and army boots. He reportedly joined several future defendants at a rifle range in a Connecticut forest, where they wore traditional Muslim clothing, knelt repeatedly in prayer -- and practiced shooting AK-47 rifles from the hip. While Abouhalima regularly moved his family to different dwellings in New York and New Jersey, his spiritual life revolved around two mosques in working-class immigrant neighborhoods: Abu Bakr in Brooklyn and al-Salam in Jersey...
...Egyptian who attended the al-Salam mosque while the sheik was preaching recalls that many listeners were Egyptian expatriates, like Abouhalima, who had undergone college training for a profession but were forced to take menial jobs in America. Some felt demeaned. Most were alienated, lonely, and suffered from guilt at having abandoned Egypt. "It was easy for a speaker like Sheik Omar to exploit those feelings," says the observer, "and that is exactly what he was doing...
Almost from the moment the two men arrived in the U.S. in 1990, Abouhalima began serving as the holy man's part-time bodyguard and driver, a fact that Abouhalima has confirmed to the New York Times despite the sheik's claim that he doesn't know the man. The sheik's sponsor in America was Shalabi, Abouhalima's boss at the Afghan recruitment center in Brooklyn. Before long, Shalabi and Sheik Omar became entangled in a struggle for leadership of the Muslim circle. In March 1991 Shalabi was found shot and stabbed to death on the floor...