Word: imams
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...Najibullah Zazi, 24, who had been under FBI surveillance since a recent trip to Pakistan, rented a car and drove to New York the day before Sept. 11. The FBI alerted the NYPD to its investigation, and police officers showed his picture to Ahmad Wais Afzali, an Afghan-born imam of a Queens mosque and an occasional police informant. According to the FBI, Afzali then tipped off both the Zazis about the investigation. FBI agents, who had been monitoring the phones, knew their cover was blown and raided homes in Queens that Zazi had visited, seizing backpacks and cell phones...
...older Zazi became a naturalized U.S. citizen.) Once in New York City, Najibullah proved to be an indifferent student at Flushing High School in Queens, more interested in basketball than in books, and he was a silent watcher at the Hazrat-i-Abubakr Sadiq mosque. His imam in those days, Mohammed Sherzad, remembers Zazi's visits to the white two-story building topped with a blue dome and minaret: "Every Saturday and Sunday, I had a class for the younger generation. Some students would ask me questions, but Najibullah never asked - he was listening...
...When Zazi was 16, bin Laden's army delivered a stunning attack on New York City and Washington. The destruction of the World Trade Center towers drove a wedge into the community of Afghan immigrants in Queens, Sherzad recalls, and the mosque was torn apart over the imam's criticism of the Taliban government that shielded bin Laden in Afghanistan. The Zazi family sided against Sherzad, he recalls, and afterward Zazi refused to meet the imam's gaze when they passed each other on the street. Still, an acquaintance told the New York Times that Zazi was baffled...
...alleged bomber set out for New York City on Sept. 9, the FBI drew the New York Police Department into the investigation, and NYPD detectives showed pictures of Zazi and three suspected accomplices to an imam they had developed as a possible informant. Sure enough, the imam, Ahmad Afzali, recognized Zazi. But according to the FBI, he called Zazi and his father to tell them of the NYPD's inquiries. And that was that. Zazi reached New York City just as the investigation was blowing...
...Islamic Republic has substituted raw political calculation for the legacy of its founder, it has not yet trickled down to the pious Shi'ites from the provinces who gather at his tomb. There, devotion and loyalty to the Imam still rings true. On a recent summer day, a group of women in head-to-toe chadors sat outside the main doors, chatting away and having a picnic. It was one of the few bright moments in a season of darkness...