Author: Shaji Iype
Publication: Desi Talk
Date: June 25, 2004
URL: http://desitalk.newsindia-times.com/2004/06/25/nyc-25-terrorism.html
Mohammed Junaid Babar, a resident
of Queens and grandson of Pakistani immigrants, who was accused
of aiding a plot to blow up British
pubs, train stations and restaurants faces a sentence of 30 years to life
in jail under an agreement with federal prosecutors in Manhattan, a law
enforcement official was quoted as saying by The New York Times on June
17.
The report said Babar, 29, pleaded
guilty in a sealed court proceeding to providing material support to terrorists
and has agreed to provide information. Babar grew up in New York, but his
grandfather inculcated him with a sense of Muslim loyalty that apparently
corroded into hatred, the Times report said.
"I did grow up there, but that doesn't
mean that my loyalty is with the Americans," Babar was quoted as saying
in an interview broadcast by ITN Five News in Canada a few months after
the 9/11 terrorist attacks, during which his mother fled the World Trade
Center. "My loyalty has always been, is and forever will be, with the Muslims."
At the time of the interview, Babar
had quit a $70,000-a-year computer job to go to Pakistan and was waiting
to be smuggled into Afghanistan to fight American troops, according to
ITN Five News report. "I can't stand by and live in America while my Muslims
are being bombed in Afghanistan," he said then. "You know, I say my loyalty
is toward them. Now it's time to prove my loyalty to the Muslims of Afghanistan."
The charges against Babar, who has
been held in the Metropolitan Detention Center, a federal jail in Lower
Manhattan, have not been made public, and spokesmen for the United States
attorney's office, the F.B.I. and the Police Department in Manhattan and
the Justice Department in Washington would not comment, the Times said.
But, under a law passed in 1996 after the Oklahoma City bombing, a person
can be convicted of providing material support to a terrorist organization
if he or she supplies money, lodging, training, expert advice or assistance,
safe houses, false documents, weapons, explosives or other lethal substances,
communications equipment, personnel or transportation to a group designated
as a terrorist organization, the report said. Three law enforcement officials,
speaking on the condition of anonymity, was quoted as saying by the Times
that there was no indication that Babar was involved in any planned attacks
in the United States, or that he had information about any.
"It wasn't an attack in the U.S.,"
one official said, "but it was a serious plot to be launched in England,
and this guy was supporting it from this country and other places."
Investigators, whose attention was
drawn to Babar when they learned of the Canadian interview, later developed
information linking him to the London plot, in which British authorities
arrested eight men at the end of March, the report said.
On the quiet, leafy street in Jamaica
where residents said Babar once lived with his parents, neighbors said
on June 17 that the family kept to itself, but that during the winter,
what seemed to be a surveillance car had been parked at all hours outside
the multifamily house.
A man who lives upstairs was quoted
as saying that the police had questioned his wife and other residents about
the building's occupants. "I have no concern with him and that's it," a
woman told the Times. According to the ITN Five News report, Babar's grandparents
left Pakistan for a better life in 1967, and Babar spent time as a youngster
with his grandfather, who "instilled in us that idea, that your loyalty
is with the Muslims." Babar was picked up on Hillside Avenue and 166th
Street in Briarwood, Queens, around the middle of April. He said he was
on his way to a taxi school he had been attending in Long Island City,
but a law enforcement official was quoted as saying by the Times that he
had apparently been cutting classes.
(Compiled from news dispatches)
