Word: sheiks
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...after Salameh's arrest, Sheik Omar, who has been living on and off in New Jersey since 1990, placed a phone call from Detroit to the New York- based National Council on Islamic Affairs to denounce the bombing. "The holy Koran commands the faithful not to commit aggression," he said. "The bombing of the World Trade Center could not have been done by a true Muslim...
...Though Sheik Omar, 55, has never been convicted of violence himself, he has been accused of giving religious approval for bloodshed. He was arrested, imprisoned, then acquitted, for encouraging the 1981 assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat. U.S. and Egyptian officials suspect him of issuing fatwas, or religious decrees, in the 1990 Manhattan slaying of Jewish militant Rabbi Meir Kahane and the 1992 Brooklyn murder of an Egyptian named Mustafa Shalabi. Egyptian security officials claim they have evidence that his teachings inspired the murder of antifundamentalist writer Farag Foda, who was killed in Egypt last June...
Cairo officials also blame Sheik Omar and his 10,000 hard-core disciples in Egypt for 20 attacks against tourist targets. The most recent, a TNT explosion that ripped through Cairo's Wadi el-Nil cafe, came just 75 minutes after the Trade Center explosion, and investigators are looking into a possible connection. Four people were killed in the Cairo blast, including a Swede and a Turk. Two Americans and a Canadian were among the 18 people injured...
...interview with TIME in January, Sheik Omar carefully denied involvement in any violent incident. "What is needed from me is not to make fatwas, but to say the truth," he said. Though his manner is good humored, Sheik Omar grows sharp when railing against the "dishonest" Western media and denouncing the brutal tactics of Egyptian security forces, abuses that are also well documented by human-rights organizations. His harsh interpretations of Muslim scriptures have won the allegiance of many young and disaffected Egyptians...
People who live in the neighborhood said they have not seen Sheik Omar since Ramadan, the Muslim holy month of fasting, which began on Feb. 22. Mohammed Mehdi, secretary-general of the National Council on Islamic Affairs, said the sheik left New York to visit friends in Detroit. Mehdi added that Sheik Omar was exhausted by the publicity surrounding the January hearing in a federal immigration court in Newark, New Jersey, when the cleric was threatened with deportation for failing to disclose on his visa application that he had passed a bad check in Egypt. The judge...