A Canadian citizen arrested as a material witness in Minneapolis this week has said he knew terrorism suspect Zacarias Moussaoui and is under investigation for other possible links to the al Qaeda network, law enforcement officials said. The man, identified by the Canadian government as Mohammed Abdullah Warsame, has told investigators that he attended an al Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan with Moussaoui and lived with him at one point, authorities said. The government is seeking to compel Warsame to testify in front of a federal grand jury in New York, Canadian and U.S. officials said. Several officials played down Warsame’s significance to the case against Moussaoui, who is the only alleged conspirator in the United States to face terrorism charges directly related to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. "It doesn’t seem that he is going to wind up, in the final analysis, as being such a big deal," one official said. "The guy doesn’t pop right out of the woodwork as a crucial part of understanding the case or Moussaoui’s involvement in it."
| It sounds like he's just more cannon fodder, on the same level as Moussaoui, only maybe not as important... |
The same official added that Warsame "is more interesting in his own right than for how he relates to Moussaoui." A name similar to Warsame’s — Mohamed Warsama — was listed on a Kenyan business card seized in 1997 from Wadih el-Hage, a Lebanese man who became a naturalized U.S. citizen and worked for several years as Osama bin Laden’s personal secretary, court records show. Hage was convicted in New York in 2001 for his role in the 1998 U.S. Embassy bombings, which killed more than 200 in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Investigators declined to say whether the business card played a role in Warsame’s arrest.
Snipping away what we know already about him being a Somali ...
Heffelfinger and other authorities were angry about the public disclosure of Warsame’s name, one official said, because investigators were hoping to use Warsame as an intelligence source. Farah told the Star Tribune that before her husband’s arrest, he called to tell her that FBI agents were at their apartment and had offered him money to cooperate. The FBI field office in Minneapolis declined to comment. |