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Police renew focus on Muslim cabbies
The article gets more interesting at link:With the arrest of a Philadelphia taxi cab driver in the Fort Dix terror plot, authorities are paying closer attention to Muslim cabbies, many of whom are militant believers, WND has learned. Mohamad Ibrahim Shnewer, a U.S. citizen born in Jordan, was charged earlier this week with conspiring to kill at least 100 soldiers on U.S. soil. The FBI says the 22-year-old drove a cab in Philadelphia. "My intent is to hit a heavy concentration of soldiers," said Shnewer, the alleged mastermind of the terror plot. Muslims account for the majority of cab drivers in many major U.S. cities including the nation's capital. And a number of them have ties to terrorism, federal and local authorities say. After 9/11, the U.S. Park Police, which enforces laws on federal roads leading into such places as CIA headquarters, ran a search of Islamic terror suspects against a database of traffic stops in the Washington, D.C., area going back decades. "It came back with a nearly 25 percent hit rate," a U.S. Park Police official said. "Many of them were cab drivers." The official, a veteran police detective who wished to go unidentified, says roughly 80 percent of cab drivers in the Washington area practice the Islamic faith. Their numbers concern police, who believe they make up part of the terror support network in America. "If they're not suspects themselves, they pick up suspects at airports and take them to safehouses here," he told WND. "It's a jihadi network." The federal Park Police work with the FBI and other law enforcement agencies assigned to the National Counter Terrorism Center, or NCTC, headquartered in McLean, Va., a Washington suburb. The FBI is now closely monitoring the activities of taxi drivers in the area, bureau sources confirm. A great many of them worship at the large Dar al-Hijrah mosque in Falls Church, Va., another D.C. suburb. On Fridays, FBI case agents say they typically observe 50 or more cabs and limos parked among other cars in the parking lots used by the radical mosque, which has included several Hamas and al-Qaida terrorists among its members. Some of the 9/11 hijackers also attended services at Dar al-Hijrah, while receiving assistance obtaining housing and IDs from mosque members and officials, some of whom are admitted members of the dangerous Muslim Brotherhood. In between fares, many taxi drivers congregate at the Starbucks located down the road in a shopping center in Baileys Crossroads, which has the highest concentration of Muslims of any area outside Dearborn, Mich. The shopping center is within a few miles of the Pentagon, and right across the street from two luxury apartment high-rises that erupted into cheers when the World Trade Center fell on 9/11. Law enforcement has dubbed the Skyline Towers the "Taliban Towers" after conducting several counterterrorism investigations involving tenants. Washington is not alone. Other major cities are dealing with radical Muslim taxi drivers. Posted by: Delphi2005 2007-05-11 |
| http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=188095 |