Mohammad Radwan Obeid, Jehovah's Witness?

by Daniel Pipes
Wed, 29 Jun 2005

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Mohammad Radwan Obeid, 33, was in bed with his fiancée, Misty Iddings, 30, at 8:37 a.m. on March 28, 2005, at their residence in Piqua, Ohio, when about 10 FBI agents pounded on the door, entered the house, questioned Obeid, and arrested him. They also seized his computer, documents he had downloaded from the Internet, computer disks, and phone numbers from his cell phone. Iddings was handed a business card for an officer connected to the local Joint Terrorism Task Force.

Immigration Judge Robert Newberry then ordered Obeid jailed. While he is charged with entering the United States via marriage fraud (he married a Kansas City woman in Jordan, arrived in the United States in February 2001, and five months later had their marriage annulled), the real concern is terrorism. He remarried and again got divorced. In mid-2004, he says, he became a Jehovah's Witness and decided to write a book on terrorism.

But Newberry, in the words of Detroit Free Press report, "agreed with the FBI that Obeid's claims of writing a book, his recent conversion to the Jehovah's Witnesses and other activities often are used by terrorists to avoid arrest and deportation."

This promises to be a particularly interesting case, with the court system having to decide whether visits to terrorist websites were done in the spirit of an adept or a researcher; and whether Obeid's conversion out of Islam was real or phony. The Obeid case offers an acute version of the dilemma I have sketched out concerning Abdullah al Kidd and Mohammed Abu Baker Mansha. (June 29, 2005)

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Reader comments on this weblog entry

Title	By	Date
Middle East Quarterly article [30 words]	matt	Jul 12, 2007 14:10
am sound and free [53 words]	mohammad r obeid	Jan 16, 2007 08:53
The FBI has gone too far [109 words]	christian peper	Feb 15, 2006 21:00
↔ Re: The FBI has GONE TOO FAR [350 words]	James F. Marino	Oct 30, 2006 21:34
not a witness [20 words]	ryan	Jan 8, 2006 01:25
↔ yes Ryan,no witness [20 words]	David	Sep 28, 2007 23:43
↔ was a witness [58 words]	muhammad obeid	Jul 26, 2008 18:48

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