On the Saturday morning in late November when Ahmed Abdullah Minni left his Alexandria, Va., home, quite possibly forever, he did his family's weekly grocery shopping. He bought the snacks his mother needs for the award-winning preschool she runs out of their tidy blue home. He stocked up on his favorite treats: Florida orange juice with no pulp, the oatmeal cookies and rice pudding. He put on latex gloves -- his family jokingly calls him "Mr. Neat" -- and sorted the laundry for his mother. Around 3 p.m., he walked to a mosque down the street for prayers with his father and brothers.Then he vanished. To Pakistan. An American kid on jihad.
Around 5 p.m., his mother became worried. This was not like him. This was not the son she considered her right hand. This was not her Hamada, her nickname for him, who called her even if he was right across Route 1 at Wal-Mart, to check in and find out if she needed anything.
"Where are you?" she demanded when he picked up his cellphone. He told her he was in Maryland at a conference. He would be home Sunday. "You better come home right now!" she said, furious. She started compiling a mental list of chores, such as raking leaves, with which she would punish him. She hung up. That was Nov. 28. She hasn't heard his voice since.
This Saturday, Minni, who turned 20 after disappearing, and four other friends from Virginia, Umar Chaudhry, 24; Ramy Zamzam, 22; Waqar Khan, 22; and Aman Hassan Yemer, 18, will appear before a Pakistani judge on five counts each of terrorism-related charges. The prosecution will call 19 witnesses, according to Minni's Pakistani attorney, who will say that al-Qaida recruited the five men to help terrorist groups in Pakistan and Afghanistan fight the United States.
Hassan Katchela, their attorney in Pakistan, said the five have been tortured while in prison. "I am confident I will be able to prove that all the evidence the prosecution has is fabricated," he said. "They have nothing to connect these boys to any terrorist purpose."
That's certainly what the stunned families and close friends the five left behind want to believe. These young men, they say, spent their free time playing sports with the mosque's youth group, watching movies, using their annual passes to Six Flags, eating at the local Kebab Palace, studying with an eye to solid American futures. But why did they leave so secretly and abruptly? Why has Ahmed written to his mother only that she must be patient, trust in Allah and not believe anything she hears?
The parents want to believe there is an innocent explanation for their sons' decision to slip away, but law enforcement sources confirm that a video left behind by Zamzam, a popular and high-achieving Howard University dental student, shows the "same finger-pointing, spitting at the camera mumbo jumbo" that extremists often post on the Internet.
"Are they typical terrorists?" asks Mustafa Abu Maryam, the youth leader at the Islamic Circle of North America, a mosque the young men attended. "No. Are they thugs? Absolutely not. Were they brainwashed by some jihadi cool fad? Who knows."
Maryam has spent the past months going over and over what happened before the vanishing, wondering why he saw no signs that something was changing for these five young men he knew and loved. "They said they wanted to defend Muslims. To help Muslims. Maybe they felt that what they were doing here was not enough. I just don't know."
The one sign he said he wished he paid more attention to is that for about three or four weeks before the day he left in November, Minni no longer looked him in the eye.
Saturdays are the hardest for Ahmed's mother, when the laughter of toddlers in her house is missing and there are no distractions. She wakes at 5 a.m. and sits in a hard-backed chair, staring out the front window, imagining Ahmed outside, parking his blue Toyota Corolla with the Obama sticker on the bumper. Wishing this were all just a bad, bad dream. She wonders if this is what heartbreak feels like, a heavy chandelier that's fallen on your chest, your throat so tight you can't even swallow your tea.
"This is not our dream," she says again and again, head in hand, rocking slowly back and forth. "This is not what we wanted our son to be. I don't understand. What happened? Who did this to my son? Who did this to my son?"
His sister, 13, who thinks Ahmed is on vacation in Mexico, wrote him a letter recalling how he came to her school honors assembly and took her out for her favorite ice cream with sprinkles to celebrate her stellar report card. She said she was hurt that he hadn't come to her most recent assembly.
"Next time," he wrote her from prison in Pakistan, "I will be there."