Suspicious Neighbors Prevent Terrorism

by Daniel Pipes
Thu, 24 Nov 2005

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Robed men with long beards and women in burqas have often prompted thoughts of Islamist terrorism, leading to the police being alerted and the suspects turn out to be perfectly clean. Indeed, just such a recent case took place at a New York Giants football game. Islamist organizations lose no time to jump on these cases as signs of prejudice, sometimes exploiting them for their own gain.

But suspicions of neighbors do turn out on many occasions to be warranted and are an extremely valuable tool of counterterrorism, as I shall note here on an occasional basis and in reverse chronological order.

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Orange County, California: Pat Rose, head of the FBI's Al-Qaeda squad in Orange County, approves of nosey neighbors: "I think we need to be concerned with everybody, including our next-door neighbor," adding that the FBI gets frequent calls from people who want to tell them about situations like a Muslim neighbor who is changing his license plates or the guy who has nothing in his apartment but a mattress and five computers. "I can't tell you how many" tips like that paid off, she said. (May 25, 2006)

Maaseik, Belgium: "Maaseik is located in the Belgian province of Limburg, a few miles from the Dutch and German borders. Until recently, its chief claim to fame was as the home town of Hubert and Jan van Eyck, the 15^th-century Flemish painters." More recently, its claim to fame concerns this town of 24,000 serving (in the words of the Washington Post) as the "center of a terrorist network stretching across Europe, the Middle East and North Africa." And how did the authorities figure this out? Again, the Post: "Rumors that radicals were living in Maaseik spread to the offices of the Belgian State Security agency in Brussels, which opened a surveillance operation in the summer of 2002."

Zeeshan Siddique: A young man from Hounslow, west London, was arrested in May 2005 in a house outside Peshawar, Pakistan because (as the New York Times puts it) of "reports that he was acting suspiciously." He has been held on suspicion of links to both Al-Qaeda and later the July 7 suicide bombers.

Maher Hawash: The one time high-flying Intel engineer with a circle of friends and volunteer activities changed; his neighbors in Oregon reported to the FBI that (as I put it in a 2003 article) "he became noticeably more devout. He grew a beard, wore Arab clothing, prayed five times a day and regularly attended mosque. He also became noticeably less friendly." An inquiry followed that ended up with Hawash arrested in March 2003, pleading guilty in August, and sentenced to a seven-year jail term in February 2004.

Waleed M. Alshehri: One of the 9/11 suicide hijackers, Waleed M. Alshehri, had lived in a large rental house in Vienna, Virginia. His and his friends' comings and goings (loud parties, pistol shooting, fancy cars with out-of-state license plates, people "always walking around out front with cellphones," a van permanently parked outside the home with a Middle-Eastern man in it monitoring a scanner or radio) aroused suspicions. The neighbor across the street, John E. Albritton, called federal authorities and another neighbor says residents complained to the FBI.

Wolverhampton, England: A report on the arrest of ten Al-Qaeda-related terrorist suspects in October 2005: "Neighbours in the Moseley Village area of Wolverhampton described how up to 20 young men at a time would stay in the two-bedroom, semi-detached house in Lewis Avenue that was raided by armed police and MI5 officers."

The Portland Seven: A ranch in Bly, Oregon, that was intended to serve as a jihad-training camp for Abu Hamza al-Masri and others, drew scrutiny in 1999 from law-enforcement officials because, as the Klamath County sheriff, Tim Evinger, later explained, "There were reports of gunfire and of a large group of suspicious, or unusual, people there." (November 24, 2005)

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Title	By	Date
silence is deafening [138 words]	djg	Dec 25, 2005 18:11
Community Policing [105 words]	Chris	Dec 9, 2005 19:36

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