Word: hamdani
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...buying a snowblower, a barbecue and a couple of lawn mowers in Canada make you a suspected link to al-Qaeda? Michael John Hamdani, 44, became just that after a shopping spree late last October in Brampton, a city west of Toronto. The owners of a shop that he and a friend had patronized believed they had received bogus U.S. traveler's checks and alerted the police. A raid on the homes of Hamdani and his pal turned up an array of big-screen TVs and other luxury goods, $600,000 in forged American Express and Thomas Cook checks...
...other words, he was a skilled underworld artisan--just the kind of guy al-Qaeda likes to work with. Fearing the worst, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police gave the case national security status, called the FBI and started grilling Hamdani. Around Christmastime, the Pakistani spilled a tantalizing tale. He said he had been paid thousands of dollars to cook up travel documents for 19 men who had traveled from Pakistan through London to Toronto in early December. He thought they had reached the U.S. on Christmas...
...Hamdani never claimed his customers were terrorists, and there is no evidence he or they had any connection to al-Qaeda. But his story arrived in Washington as U.S. security officials were going on full holiday alert. Pakistani authorities came up with information about an alien-smuggling scheme that dovetailed with the forger's account. On Dec. 27, Islamabad gave the FBI photos and names or aliases of five men thought to be among the 19 smuggled aliens Hamdani had served. The U.S. quickly put out an unusually prominent all-points bulletin for the five. "We don't have...
Canadian authorities are expected to extradite Hamdani to New York to face the 1996 indictment and tell his new story to federal prosecutors. Sources say he passed polygraph tests in Canada. But some veterans remain skeptical. FBI agents who investigated his fake-passport operation in New York concluded, as one G-man put it, "You wouldn't trust him as far as you could throw him." Still, another FBI official says, "we really couldn't afford not to take this seriously. There were so many unknowns." Nevertheless, he adds, for all the FBI knew, the men in question might have...
COVER Photograph for TIME by Anis Hamdani -- Gamma Liaison