The Guyanese al-Qaeda operative and the third most wanted man on the FBI’s terror list.

CARICOM WAS WARNED ABOUT THE THREAT OF MUSLIM EXTREMISM FROM GUYANESE MUSLIMS.

In the presence of representatives from more than 25 countries, the international and regional community had been warned, that should there be any Caribbean involvement in terrorist activities. That the likelihood that there would be black Guyanese involved was almost 100% certain. The warning was made in 2005 by a Guyanese delegate who had made a study on the structure of Islam in Guyana, at an international Caricom seminar for a Small Business training program.  The majority of black Guyanese men he noted were converted to Islam while in prison. The disaffected poorly educated men in prison are fertile soil for radicalization. Above left Abdul Kadir is the exact opposite of the profile given for radicalization by the delegate. Kadir is a former Guyanese parliamentarian, who was arrested along with his cohorts in the middle and right, in the plot to blow up the Kennedy International Airport in New York. Before he was arrested Kadir had repeated contacts with Mohsen Rabbani (an Iranian cleric involved in the 1994 bombing of a Jewish synagogue in Argentina), and Adnan Shukrijumah, using his extensive influence as a former parliamentarian Kadir was able to help Shukrijumah secure a Guyanese passport.

A Spanish language wanted poster featuring Osama bin Laden, Ayman al Zawahiri and Adnan el-Shukrijumah.

Figure: Adnan al-Shukrijumah the Saudi born Guyanese was at one time the third most wanted member of al-Qaeda after Ayman al-Zawahiri and Osama bin Laden. The case of Shukrijumah confused many American ‘reporters’, for years who wrote about him as a Saudi Arabian. Shukrijumah was born in Saudi Arabia, to a Guyanese cleric and his wife. Adnan’s father Gulshair Shukrijumah was born and raised in Guyana grew up in Guyana and ran a mosque there, after he returned from studying Islamic theology in Saudi Arabia. Shukrijumah used passport #A041472141, issued in the US, to enter Trinidad and Tobago he arrived on May 17 2001, on a flight from Guyana. Shukrijumah’s family resided in Trinidad in the 1980’s   while his father, travelled preaching at various mosques. Shukrijumah found succor amongst Muslim’s in Trinidad and Tobago sympathetic to al-Qaeda’s cause. He was last seen in Trinidad on September 4, 2006. His father was an Imam in Miramar Florida, at the al-Hijra Mosque.  Convicted terrorist Jose Padilla also worshipped at the al-Hijra mosque. A report on December 7, 2014, by KNews stated the following: ‘Al-Qaeda operative with Guyanese parents killed by Pakistan military. A high-level al-Qaeda operative with Guyanese links, who was wanted in the US over a bomb plot, has been killed during a raid in Pakistan’s tribal region, according to Pakistan’s military.

Adnan Shukrijumah was killed along with two other suspected fighters in South Waziristan early on Saturday, the Pakistani military said in a statement.

One Pakistani soldier died while another was critically injured in the operation, the statement said.

A Guyanese national who was born in Saudi Arabia, Shukrijumah is believed to have been al-Qaeda’s external-operations chief, although it is not clear whether he was still in that role at the time of his death.

“The al-Qaeda leader, who was killed by the Pakistan army in a successful operation, is the same person who had been indicted in the United States,” a senior Pakistani army officer told the Associated Press news agency.

Federal prosecutors in the US alleged that Shukrijumah had recruited three men in 2008 to receive training in Pakistan’s tribal areas with the intention of bombing the New York City subway system.

The FBI had offered a US$5M reward for his capture.

Pakistan said that Shukrijumah had fled to South Waziristan following the commencement of a military operation, Zarb-e-Azb, in neighbouring North Waziristan.

Shukrijumah and two other people – described as an “accomplice” and a “local facilitator” – were killed in the raid.

The alleged Manhattan subway-bombing plot was uncovered in September 2009 and Shukrijumah was indicted in that case by a New York court in July 2010.

The indictment also linked him to a similar never-executed scheme to attack British subways.

Eric Holder, US Attorney-General, has called the alleged New York plot one of the most dangerous since the al-Qaeda attacks of September 11, 2001.

Shukrijumah had lived more than 15 years in the U.S. and had become chief of the terror network’s global operations, the FBI says, marking the first time that a leader who is so intimately familiar with American society was placed in charge of planning attacks.

Shukrijumah, 39, was born in Saudi Arabia, and is a citizen of Guyana. He had taken over a position once held by 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who was captured in 2003. That position had put him in regular contact with al-Qaeda’s senior leadership, including Osama bin Laden.

Shukrijumah and two other leaders were part of an “external operations council” that designed and approved terrorism plots and recruits, but his two counterparts were killed in U.S. drone attacks, leaving Shukrijumah as the de facto chief and successor to Mohammed — his former boss.

“He’s making operational decisions is the best way to put it,” said LeBlanc, the FBI’s lead Shukrijumah investigator. “He’s looking at attacking the U.S. and other Western countries. 

The FBI had been searching for Shukrijumah since 2003. He was thought to be the only al-Qaeda leader to have once held permanent U.S. resident status, or a green card.

Shukrijumah’s father, who died in 2004, was born in Guyana, thus his son’s eligibility for citizenship here.

Shukrijumah was named earlier in 2010 in a federal indictment as a conspirator in the case against three men accused of plotting suicide bomb attacks on New York’s subway system in 2009. The indictment marked the first criminal charges against Shukrijumah, who previously had been sought only as a witness.

Shukrijumah is also suspected of playing a role in plotting of potential al-Qaeda bomb attacks in Norway and a never-executed attack on subways in the United Kingdom. Travel records and other evidence also indicate Shukrijumah did research and surveillance in spring 2001 for a never-attempted plot to disrupt commerce in the Panama Canal by sinking a freighter there, LeBlanc said.

Shukrijumah, who trained at al-Qaeda’s Afghanistan camps in the late 1990s, was labeled a “clear and present danger” to the U.S. in 2004 by then-Attorney General John Ashcroft.

Shukrijumah’s mother, Zurah Adbu Ahmed, reportedly said in 2010 on the front stoop of her small home in suburban Miramar, Fla., that her son frequently talked about what he considered the excesses of American society — such as alcohol and drug abuse and women wearing skimpy clothes — but that he did not condone violence.

She also said she has not had contact with her son for several years.

“This boy would never do evil stuff. He is not an evil person,” she said. “He loved this country. He never had a problem with the United States.”

Before turning to radical strains of Islam, Shukrijumah lived in Miramar with his mother and five siblings, excelling at computer science and chemistry courses while studying at community college.

He had come to South Florida in 1995 when his father, a Muslim cleric and missionary trained in Saudi Arabia, decided to take a post at a Florida mosque after several years at a mosque in Brooklyn, N.Y.

At some point in the late 1990s, according to the FBI, Shukrijumah became convinced that he must participate in “jihad,” or holy war, to fight perceived persecution against Muslims in places like Chechnya and Bosnia.

That led to training camps in Afghanistan, where he underwent basic and advanced training in the use of automatic weapons, explosives, battle tactics, surveillance and camouflage.

While still in Afghanistan, he met another young recruit — Jose Padilla, an American citizen once suspected of plotting to set off a radioactive “dirty bomb” and now imprisoned on a 2007 terrorism material support conviction in Miami.

At one point, according to interrogations of Padilla and other al-Qaeda detainees, Shukrijumah and Padilla were paired in a plot to fill apartments in several high-rise apartment buildings with natural gas and blow them up, but they had a falling out”.

As can be gleaned from the information in the public domain Shukrijumah was a highly placed al-Qaeda operative who was actively pursuing a course, of perpatarating attacks in the West particularly America. Shukrijumah shatters the stereotypical image of a Caribbean male, his is a ‘profile’, yet to be taken into account by the various intelligence aparatus’ of the US, which is that of an educated westerner with links not only to the west but also in the ME, a multi-lingual person who grew up Muslim who looks like a Middle Easterner, yet is fully western and street savvy since he is a Caribbean male. The profile previously enumerated, is the perfect terrorist, since they fit no specific ‘intelligence profile’ of a potential terrosrist, making them nearly impossible to spot in their developmental stages. Such individuals in the Caribbean in countries with high Muslim populations are becoming the rule and not the exception. The future operational theatre for ‘spectacular’ terror attacks on the scale of 9/11 is not North America or Europe but the Caribbean. Government corruption, the presence of Mexican Transnational Illicit Narcotics Trafficking Organizations, porous borders, endemic poverty , weak infrastructure, the non existant exchange of security intel regionally amongst security institutions and the high level of North American and European citizens living , travelling and vacationing throughout the region, it is literally a ‘sitting duck’, waiting on a terror strike. All the ingredients for a spectacular regional attack are here, with the diminishing of the IS territory in Iraq and Syria, it is only a matter of time before returning jihadist’s from Trinidad in coordination with their IS emir’s will stage attacks in Trinidad and Tobago and beyond regionally.