Junaid Babar: Government Informant

 

The Anatomy of A Betrayal

-Colin Freeze & Greg McArthur, Globe and Mail

 

The Islamic warrior trained alongside seven Britons in Pakistan - and then decided to testify against them, a move that could also bolster the case against a Canadian terrorism suspect. COLIN FREEZE and GREG McARTHUR report from London and New York
In a room at the end of the fifth-floor hallway of a luxury hotel, four FBI agents hunkered down with a 29-year-old Islamic terrorist named Mohammad Junaid Babar. He was allowed to order food and watch television, but these were not easy days. The curtains were drawn. He was under constant supervision. He had been asked to make a critical decision.
It was April 6, 2004, and the police and the terrorist were in the Embassy Suites Hotel in lower Manhattan. The building is more frequently used by tourists and corporate clients such as IBM and Merrill Lynch who negotiate contracts and strategize in the hotel's expansive conference rooms.
But the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation opted to use Room 538 - a 10-metre by 15-metre space - to make a deal with different consequences. This was the interrogation that would sever friendships and help authorities dissect a bombing conspiracy that had been uncovered in Britain.
It would also bolster the evidence against Momin Khawaja, then a 24-year-old computer programmer from Ottawa and the first man to be charged under Canada's anti-terrorism legislation.
Inside the confines of Room 538, the agents started pressing Mr. Babar to give evidence against Mr. Khawaja and the other accused, a court has heard.
"I don't know if it was because I was tortured by my thoughts or in custody, but I had many nights where I couldn't sleep," Mr. Babar, a native New Yorker, would later testify.
He had been devoted to his militant version of Islam and his Muslim brothers, and now he was being severely tested.
To make his decision, he turned to the life of the Prophet Mohammed.
When Mr. Babar made his first public appearance as an aspiring Islamic warrior, he picked the perfect venue. In November of 2001, the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad was a holding pen for the world's press.
Dozens of reporters were holed up there, awaiting permission to enter Afghanistan to cover the U.S. invasion. Every morning they were greeted in the lobby by potential translators, fixers and Pakistanis trying to pitch them stories.
Mr. Babar and his friends joined the flock, saying they were members of a group called Al-Muhajiroun, a British-based organization of militant Muslims who were calling for a global Islamic revolution.
He said he was from New York and had flown to Pakistan shortly after the attacks on his hometown - to help fight U.S. soldiers.
"I will kill every American that I see in Afghanistan. . . . If I see them in Pakistan, I will kill every American soldier I can in Pakistan," he told a British television news reporter. "It's time to prove my loyalty to the Muslims of Afghanistan."
The press was skeptical. Anne Barnard of The Boston Globe wondered about this bearded young man in glasses. He knew the subway route to Yankee Stadium, and even said his own mother had fled from the north tower of the World Trade Center during the Sept. 11 attacks.
"He seemed like the kind of kid who would have never been in a schoolyard fist fight," she recalled. "I kept asking him: 'Have you ever fired a gun? Have you ever hit a guy?'
"He seemed like a guy who was trying to prove his manhood or something."
Just to be safe, before she wrote a story about her encounter, one of her colleagues checked public records for the man. None was found, because Mr. Babar had given her a false name. He dropped his last name, and called himself Mohammad Junaid.
His story seemed impossible. Mr. Babar even told her he was going to start his own terrorist training camp.
Then the Taliban was ousted faster than Mr. Babar expected and he never made it into Afghanistan.
But he was serious and he kept his word on the training.
Mr. Babar found a wife and settled in Lahore, but often travelled to Britain. His anger toward the Western incursions into Muslim lands persisted. During his trips, and on the Internet, he sought out others - usually Western Muslims like himself - who felt the same way.
In his backyard, he and a close circle of intimates from Britain began conducting small-scale bomb experiments, detonating spice jars full of ammonium nitrate fertilizer - but only when his wife was away. They decided that if they wanted to be full-blown jihadis, they had better get serious.
A core group of six Britons and Mr. Babar made their way to a training camp in the mountains of Malakand, near the Afghan border, Mr. Babar would later testify. As they travelled, they pretended to be secular Western tourists who wanted to take a peek at Pakistan's glaciers.
No public praying was allowed on the journey. Everyone was to stay clean shaven. They took a lot of pictures along the way.
During one trek to the 3,050-metre peak, one warrior faltered because he had no mountain boots - only Nikes without laces. Another got food poisoning and became notorious for hogging the bathroom at pit stops. It has come out in court that another was given a nickname by his impatient peers: "Abu Finish-up!"
Still, at the end of the journey, Kalashnikov rifles awaited on a mountain top. Mr. Babar says that jihadis-in-training took target practice with cans, and learned how to assemble and disassemble their rifles. A lucky few even got to fire the rocket launcher, Mr. Babar would later testify.
Others experimented with fertilizer bombs.
Mr. Babar left jihad training early - he had to see the birth of his child. But he would later testify that the Britons at the camp gave him another task - to get in touch with a Canadian who also wanted to train.
"What up bro, listen my name is Kashif," Mr. Babar, using a pseudonym, wrote in an e-mail that was later displayed in court. "[The group leader] is away for a little while and won't be back for a couple of weeks. He told me to e-mail you and arrange everything with you.
"Send me your flight information because I will be picking you up from the airport. . . . I will be wearing green trousers, a blue Diadora T-shirt and blue Nike sneakers."
The response came quickly.
"Alright bro, arriving on Thursday July 15 at 3 p.m. at Islamabad airport."
British prosecutors say the e-mail was sent by Mr. Khawaja, a Canadian newcomer who would become a close confidante of Mr. Babar.
Mr. Khawaja had grown up in suburban Ottawa, playing street hockey with his brothers and praying in a mosque across the street from a Tim Hortons. The son of Pakistani immigrants, his day job was to fix computers for Canada's Department of Foreign Affairs.
But his true passions were Islam and the Internet.
He picked up a lot of his ideas and friends on-line. British prosecutors say he blogged about his "radical approach to Islam" and met likeminded people through instant-messaging programs.
After landing in Pakistan, he met one in person.
"He made jokes. He was amusing," Mr. Babar would later testify.
Mr. Babar described Mr. Khawaja as a smart, enthusiastic young man, even if he lacked discretion. "He had a long beard," Mr. Babar would later say in court. "We asked him to remove it or trim it down for security reasons."
"He did bring money with him; he brought Canadian dollars and some U.K. pounds. It was maybe in total not more than £1,800," Mr. Babar would later testify. "Half of the money was supposed to be going to al-Qaeda for their operations."
It has come out in a British courtroom that soon after his arrival, Mr. Khawaja asked Mr. Babar to act as a guest at an important dinner date. Mr. Khawaja had arranged an encounter with a prospective bride he met on the Internet and Mr. Babar was introduced to the woman, Zeba Khan, as Mr. Khawaja's friend from New York.
Mr. Babar was gregarious, Ms. Khan said. He talked and talked, and said some things that seemed a little farfetched.
"He thought that the moonwalk was a Western conspiracy," Ms. Khan told The Globe and Mail. "It takes a special kind of . . . perception of the world to doubt what's a basic and indisputable fact in modern history."
Shortly after, Mr. Babar smoothed the Canadian's entry to the Malakand training camp, Mr. Babar has testified. While they did not travel together, he has testified that his new friend returned excited.
"He said that he had fired a rocket launcher at the camp," Mr. Babar would testify. "He was very enthusiastic about the training camp."
After Mr. Khawaja went back to Canada, he kept in touch with his new friends via e-mail. The trip had only served to stoke his fervour, according to e-mails later presented in court by British authorities.
They suggest Mr. Khawaja wanted help making jihadist videotapes from footage they shot of the training camp. "Tell [Mr. Babar] to parcel the video from the summer. I can put something together here," one said.
Prosecutors also say Mr. Khawaja identified an associate who wanted to perform a suicide bombing against Jews - derogatorily referred to as "Yahoodi."
"When I was in Pakistan me and [Mr. Babar] talked about Immy, what's he going to do there. We have a suggestion for a one-way operation to the most high, maybe in Yahoodi land," the e-mail said.
Many of these communications were secretive. In fact, no e-mails were actually sent from one Yahoo account registered to the username Pleasure_of_Allah.
British prosecutors say only a few people, including Mr. Khawaja and Mr. Babar, knew the password.
They used it to log in, write drafts and save them, leaving them in a folder for the next person to read.
That way, the e-mails never travelled and nobody could intercept the messages.
A few months later, prosecutors say, Mr. Khawaja left another message: "Nigga, praise the most high we get the device working."
The training-camp cohorts of Mr. Babar didn't know it, but weeks after their return to Britain from Pakistan, they were placed under 24-hour surveillance. The police were videotaping them coming and going from their homes.
Police also hacked into the e-mail accounts and discovered some bizarre messages - notes sent between sympathizers of Osama bin Laden that appeared more like fans of gangsta rappers. "Wots up nigga," began one representative e-mail. "Ok Nigga, we can get the device," another message said.
The police installed a bug in the group leader's Suzuki SUV. This helped Scotland Yard watch - and listen - when he picked up a friend at Heathrow Airport who had arrived on an Air Canada flight around midnight.
Scotland Yard officers say the passenger was Momin Khawaja, and they hadn't seen him before that juncture. Who was this young Canadian, one officer recalls wondering, and why was he in Britain for only three days?
Prosecutors now say that in the car ride, the group leader urged Mr. Khawaja to be professional and secretive, before they went to an Internet café together. Authorities say they looked at pictures of detonators that Mr. Khawaja had been secretly building in his family home in Ottawa.
This was regarded as an alarming development by police, who had already discovered 600 kilograms of ammonium nitrate fertilizer in a storage shed. The fertilizer represented about a quarter of the material used to raze a government building in Oklahoma City, killing more than 160 people.
The detonators, coupled with the fertilizer and a sparking substance like aluminum powder, was capable of killing many innocent people. The police sneaked into the shed and replaced the chemical with an inert substance.
After Mr. Khawaja returned home, police say they heard the rest of the group mention potential targets: shopping centres, power stations, nightclubs.
The time to act had come.
In March of 2004, Mounties in tactical uniforms stormed past a white picket fence and battered down the door of the Khawaja family home in suburban Ottawa, finding only Mr. Khawaja's relatives. The suspect wasn't there, but they did seize electrical equipment - now being described in Britain as equipment meant to detonate a bomb by remote control.
RCMP officers found Mr. Khawaja at Foreign Affairs fixing computers. He was arrested and charged.
Hours after Mr. Khawaja's detention, hundreds of officers raided addresses across Britain. Scotland Yard announced they had arrested more than a half-dozen suspects and had foiled a major bombing conspiracy.
Having amassed incriminating e-mails, phone conversations and bomb materials, all the pieces of the puzzle were coming together for investigators.
But one piece was still missing.
Mr. Babar had returned to New York, and on the morning of April 6, he was headed to a taxi-driving course. It was six days after the raids in Canada and Britain, and he suspected police might be on the lookout for him. When four men in suits approached, he wasn't surprised, he would later testify.
The FBI and the U.S. Attorney's office in New York say they can't comment on anything to do with Mr. Babar's case, including why they waited six days after the raids to nab him, or why they chose to take him a hotel. But for some reason, they escorted him to the suite with a view of the Hudson River.
One agent sat next to him and the other three sat across from him in chairs. They started asking him about highly secretive information - things he knew about code words and money drops - and realized they were onto him.
He was being asked to become a government witness.
He had a lot to consider: his loyalty to his friends, his wife in Pakistan. He thought of his newborn baby and the prospect of spending decades in jail.
In the end, he says he thought mostly of an Islamic parable.
As the story goes, a man came to the Prophet Mohammed, weeping. He told him that heathens had captured him, tortured him and made him renounce Islam. He felt horrible.
The Prophet told the man not to worry, because it doesn't matter what you say; the measure of a Muslim is what's in his heart.
"It was the only quote I had in my head," Mr. Babar would later explain.
Only four hours after being arrested, he waived his Miranda rights - something he would do every afternoon for the next four days - and started to talk.
For the past few weeks, the mornings have been routine outside the Old Bailey courthouse in London: a siren pierces the air and a helicopter's rotor whirs overhead. Tactical police officers on foot yell at passersby to go away. It's all one big effort to create a "sterile area" for the arrival of the star, terrorist witness.
Mohammad Junaid Babar is led from a police van and into a courtroom guarded by officers toting submachine guns with scopes. He is escorted past the glares of his seven former friends: Omar Khyam, Anthony Garcia, Jawad Akbar, Waheed Mahmood, Shujah Mahmood, Salahuddin Amin and Nabeel Hussain.
During three days of testimony in early April, he looked at them only once.
Twelve jurors have listened as he is branded a liar, a sellout and even a "rat" by a phalanx of wigged and robed defence lawyers. They've wondered aloud to reporters about Mr. Babar's credibility and the circumstances that led him to a hotel room in New York.
"How can somebody just be picked up off the street who's so committed, and yet so easily fall under the spell of the FBI? There's something more to it - there's something more to it than that," Imran Khan, a defence lawyer for one of the accused Britons, told The Globe and Mail.
Mr. Babar has admitted he told some lies to the FBI initially. But when he realized they knew too much, he gave in to their demands. He signed a co-operation agreement and pleaded guilty to being an al-Qaeda member. Now, the jail time he'll serve in the United States will be determined by the help he gives to his former sworn enemies.
"You've co-operated with Canadian authorities, which are prosecuting Momin Khawaja?" one lawyer recently asked him in court.
"Yes."
"What you are doing is betraying one of your friends, yes?"
"Yes."
"It's also a betrayal of your cause, yes?"
"Yes."
"You're prepared to betray your friends and your cause?"
"Yes."
Mr. Khawaja's trial is scheduled to begin in early January in Ottawa, where his lawyer, Lawrence Greenspon, says he is preparing for Mr. Babar to testify.
Family, friends won't talk
Since he first made headlines in the United States, Mohammad Junaid Babar's family and friends have stayed silent on his case.
An elderly man at Mr. Babar's parents' home in Queens, N.Y., greeted a Globe and Mail reporter politely, but locked and shut the screen door, and then the front door, when asked about the case.
Mr. Babar also has a sister, a graduate of the University of Peshawar medical school who practises family medicine in Illinois. When she was contacted by a Globe reporter she confirmed that their mother escaped from the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001, but said she was estranged from her brother and hung up the phone.
None of the officials from the many mosques near Mr. Babar's house could remember him attending. The British Broadcasting Corp. linked him to the Islamic Center of Queens, but when the mosque's founder, Aqeel Khan, was shown a picture of Mr. Babar he told The Globe and Mail that he didn't recognize him. Mr. Khan acknowledged that from the late 1990s to only a few years ago the management of the mosque had been taken over by a group of radicals from an organization called Hizb ut Tahrir. It was only in the past few years that he was able to wrest back control. "They were not properly serving the mosque. They were serving something else," Mr. Khan said.

 

Click here to return to the Articles Page

 

Click here to return to the Home Page