Why were “British militants” running a mosque in Queens? Why wasn’t it shut down? Jihad In America Update from the TimesOnline, :
AN AMERICAN al-Qaeda operative who was a close associate of the leader of the July 7 bombers was recruited at a New York mosque that British militants helped to run.
British radicals regularly travelled to the Masjid Fatima Islamic Centre, in Queens, to organise sending American volunteers to jihadi training camps in Pakistan.
Investigators reportedly found that Mohammad Sidique Khan had made calls to the mosque last year in the months before he led the terrorist attack on London that killed 52 innocent people….
A new book, The One Percent Doctrine, by Ron Suskind, claims that FBI and CIA agents discovered that Khan had made trips to the US and was in contact with American Muslim extremists on the East Coast.
Mohammad Junaid Babar, one recruit from the Masjid Fatima Islamic Centre, has told US intelligence officials that he met Khan in a jihadi training camp in Pakistan in July 2003. He claims that the pair became friends as they studied how to assemble explosive devices.
Babar, 31, a computer programmer, says that it was at the Masjid Fatima centre that he became a radical. He has admitted in a US court to supplying money and military materials to a high-ranking al-Qaeda official at the jihadi camp in South Waziristan, close to the Afghan border. Babar moved to Britain after his month at the camp. FBI agents who arrested him in Queens in April 2004 say that he had been under surveillance “for some time” but so far they have not revealed all that Babar told them about Khan.