A Bronx martial arts instructor from the Bronx pleaded guilty today to a charge of “conspiring to provide material support or resources” to Al Qaeda, said Michael J. Garcia, the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York. In making his plea before United States Magistrate Gabriel W. Gorenstein, the martial arts instructor, Tarik Shah, admitted that he had agreed to train Qaeda terrorists in martial arts and hand-to-hand combat with weapons. Mr. Shah’s plea follows the guilty plea entered on Monday by a paramedic from Washington, Mahmud Faruq Brent, who admitted attending a training camp run by the Pakistani terror group Lashkar-e-Taiba in 2002. Mr. Shah and Mr. Brent are two of four men accused in an elaborate federal sting operation of plotting to provide training and money to terrorists. Mr. Brent’s lawyer, Hassen ibn Abdellah, said on Monday that his client would not testify against his co-defendants and that he pleaded guilty only to have his potential sentence cut almost in half, to a maximum of 15 years.
The case began in May 2005, with the arrest of Mr. Shah, a New York jazz musician and martial arts expert, who was accused of swearing an oath of allegiance to Al Qaeda. Mr. Shah, who grew up in the Bronx and spent his allowance on Cannonball Adderley records, was accused of offering hand-to-hand combat training to jihadists. He was also accused of offering training to Mr. Brent when they lived in Beacon, N.Y., in 2001.
An associate of Mr. ShahÂ’s, Rafiq Sabir, a doctor from Boca Raton, Fla., was charged with offering medical assistance to potential Al Qaeda operatives. A fourth man, Abdulrahman Farhane, a Brooklyn bookseller, is accused of plotting with an F.B.I. informer to send money overseas to buy weapons and communications equipment for Muslims fighting United States forces in Afghanistan.
Federal agents initially linked Mr. Brent to Mr. Shah through a telephone number for Mr. Brent in an address book belonging to Mr. Shah that New York police detectives found during a search of Mr. Shah’s apartment in December 2003. According to the complaint against Mr. Brent, he met with Mr. Shah in Columbia, Md., in 2005, and described how difficult it had been to reach the camp in Pakistan. Mr. Brent nonetheless told Mr. Shah, the complaint said, that the experience had been “one of the better decisions of my life” and that he hoped that “Allah would bless him” for his efforts. Prosecutors say that passport records show that Mr. Brent was in Pakistan from February to June 2002.
The camp was operated by Lashkar-e-Taiba, a group loosely affiliated with Al Qaeda, whose primary goal was to fight Indian forces in the disputed province of Kashmir. The group was declared a foreign terrorist organization by the United States in December 2001.