Memphian Plotted One-Man Jihad

From Creeping Sharia:

Tenn: Memphian plotted one-man jihad v homeland


Posted on January 12, 2011 by creeping

While the media and pundits focus on the Arizona shooting, few if any seem to be paying attention to this Muslim convert who killed a U.S. soldier and wounded another in Arkansas, all in the name of Islam.



Memphian drifted to dark side of Islamic extremism, plotted one-man jihad vs. homeland



What I had in mind didn’t go as planned but Allah willing He will reward me for my intentions.



He planned for weeks, buying guns secondhand to avoid the FBI.



Then, to test whether the feds were watching, he bought a .22-caliber rifle over the counter at Walmart. He stockpiled ammo and practiced target shooting at empty construction sites.



By his own account, he was preparing for jihad.



From a black Ford Explorer Sport Trac, Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad, a Memphis native, watched two soldiers in fatigues smoking outside a military recruiting center in Little Rock. He aimed an assault rifle out the window and fired.



Muhammad sped away, hoping to flee 150 miles to Memphis where he would switch cars. But a wrong turn in a construction zone led him to police.



He stepped out of the SUV wearing a green ammo belt around his waist.



“It’s a war going on against Muslims, and that is why I did it,” an officer heard him say. “You see how I gave up with no problem.”



Much of this account emerges from police reports and an 18-page mental-health evaluation contained in court files. But Muhammad tells a far broader, detailed story in seven handwritten letters to The Commercial Appeal. Taken together, those letters are not just an admission of guilt but a profession of failure for having not caused more death and destruction.



The letters, written in pencil between May and October, provide a rare glimpse into the thoughts of a self-described jihadist, according to one national security expert. Muhammad describes in his own words how he took his declaration of faith in a Memphis mosque; his motives for moving to Yemen and his attempt to travel to Somalia for weapons training; how and why he planned multiple attacks in the U.S, including ones in Nashville and Florence, Ky., that didn’t go as intended; and how he allegedly executed the Little Rock assault.



In his own words:



It’s a war out against Islam and Muslims and I’m on the side of the Muslims point blank … The U.S. has to pay for the rape, murder, bloodshed, blasphemy it has done and still doing to the Muslims and Islam. So consider this a small retaliation the best is to come Allah willing. This is not the first attack and won’t be the last.



Muhammad is yet to convince U.S. authorities he’s anything other than the murderer of Pvt. William A. Long of Conway, Ark. He’s being held on state charges, awaiting a February trial.



But one senior consultant to the U.S. government on global terrorism believes Muhammad’s self-described attack in June 2009 and others like it — lone gunmen with no formal al-Qaida training or direction — illustrate the new nature of an old enemy.



Al-Qaida has shifted from a far away, tough-to-join group to a social network that almost anyone, anywhere can join. Even a middle-class, Baptist kid from Memphis, born Carlos Bledsoe, who played youth basketball and worked at Chuck E. Cheese’s.



…



Muhammad later told the state psychiatrist he first began planning to carry out jihad against America while he was in prison.



In January 2009, he was deported back to the United States.



I came back to America on a mission. And the feds knew I had been to places in Yemen where “foreigners” are not supposed to go. The feds knew I had the Somali I.D. and why I had it. The reason was to go to Somalia!! To join my Mujahideen brothers and get training, because I had none. So my original plan was foiled once I was arrested in Yemen. … I had to revise another plan and I did with the help of the Mujahideen … Al Qaeda Organization in the Arabian Peninsula.



…



Plan A, as he called it in one letter, was to assassinate “3 Zionist rabbis in Memphis, Little Rock and Nashville. Then target recruitment centers from the South to the nation’s capital. And other Zionist organizations in the northeast. That was the plan, which mostly failed.”



Muhammad said he began his jihad in Little Rock and reported to the state psychiatrist that he “did something” there but did not elaborate.



Next he drove through Memphis to Nashville. He had prepared a carton of Molotov cocktails, lit one and threw it at what he believed to be the home of an orthodox rabbi. But it bounced off the glass.



He drove to his next target, an Army recruiting center in Florence, Ky. He had researched recruiting centers before he left Little Rock and chose one in Florence because “it was near an interstate and bordered Ohio. Easy to get away.” But the office was closed.



“It was supposed to be my first,” he told the psychiatrist.



Muhammad was frustrated at his failed attempts. He had saved money for the guns, ammunition and gas for the trip, which he said cost “near $4 a gallon” at the time.



He went home to plan.



We believe in an eye for eye not turn the other cheek. …We are all brothers under the same banner fighting for the same cause. … (T)he war has no boundaries as you can see. … Unless the U.S. government pulls fully out of Iraq and Afghanistan and stop(s) helping Israel in (its) massacre of Muslims, blood will flow in the U.S.A. like tap water.



* * *



On the morning of June 1, 2009, Muhammad drove down Rodney Parham Road in Little Rock. His Plan B, he said, was a “random and unplanned attack” for which he chose the recruiting center.



“I went around the corner so they (couldn’t) see me,” he said of the soldiers standing outside smoking. “I did not want them to see me coming. I had the SKS with me and put it out the window. I rolled by and started shooting.”



He made his intent clear: “I was trying to kill them.”



Pvt. William A. Long, 23, of Conway, Ark., lay on the sidewalk in a pool of blood.



Pvt. Quinton Ezeagwula, 18, of Jacksonville, Ark., crawled inside.