One wonders what access he may have had to the Portland water supply. “Reaz Qadir Khan’s alleged ties to suicide bomber Ali Jaleel: Portland to the Maldives (video preview),” by Kimberly A.C. Wilson for The Oregonian, May 29:
Portland resident Reaz Qadir Khan was arrested in March on a shocking charge: conspiracy to support terrorism.
Khan, now 49, was a Pakistani-born naturalized U.S. citizen who moved to Portland in 2005 to work as a wastewater treatment operator for the city of Portland.
Just a month after moving here, federal prosecutors allege, Khan got in touch by email with a friend across the globe: a young extremist from the Maldives Islands named Ali Jaleel. The younger man is quoted in a federal indictment describing a desire he and Khan once shared to seek martyrdom for Islam.
Prosecutors say Khan would go on to finance Jaleel’s terrorist training three years later, advancing the young jihadi’s role in a plot to destroy a government intelligence building in Lahore, Pakistan. The 2009 attack killed roughly 30 people and injured more than 300.
Prosecutors won’t say when they think Khan grew close to Ali Jaleel, more than a decade Khan’s junior. But the answer is likely to be found somewhere in Jaleel’s relationship to the land of Khan’s birth, Pakistan.
For clues to why a Portland city worker may have become enmeshed, as prosecutors say he did, in a deadly bomb plot, scour the past of the man he is accused of helping….