New Delhi: It was a sermonising piece of writing by terrorist organization Al Qaeda’s key leader Anwar Al-Awlaki, now dead, that seemingly convinced Hyderabad-origin engineer Mohammad Ibrahim Zubair that it was okay to cheat banks and engineer credit card frauds to garner funds to finance violent activities by the outfit that was behind the 9/11 attack.
On Thursday evening, Zubair was flown back to India when he landed in Amritsar on being deported from the US where he had served his five-year-long sentence after his conviction for financing terror and financial frauds.
Indian security officials are expected to probe his linkages as soon as he completes his mandatory 14-day quarantine period.
Zubair seemed very impressed with Awlaki’s writing on January 5, 2009, in a piece called “44 ways of supporting Jihad” where the Al Qaeda leader justified even financial frauds and cheating banks if it was to finance jihadist acts of violence.
Pointing out the importance of the importance of ‘jihad of wealth’, Awlaki wrote: “No money, no jihad, and jihad needs lots of it… Probably the most important contribution the Muslims of the West could do for jihad is ‘jihad with their wealth’ since in many cases the ‘Mujahideen’ are in need of money more than they are in need of men.”
After completing his early education from Hyderabad’s Osmania University from 1997-2001, Zubair left India to do his engineering from the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, Illinois, from 2001-2005, before settling down in Toledo, Ohio, in 2006.
Reported to be self-radicalised in terror outfit Al Qaeda’s radical Islamist way of thinking by watching videos and listening to ‘nasheeds’ (lectures), 40-year-old Zubair took great pride in his engineering degree.
On January 29, 2008, Zubair sent a link on the email to his elder brother Farooq Mohammad, also a convicted Al Qaida terrorist in the same case with a subject line: “You’ll laugh hard.”
The link was of a document titled ‘Engineers of Jihad’ which stated, “We find that graduates from subjects such as science, engineering, and medicine are strongly overrepresented among Islamist movements in the Muslim world… This is all the more puzzling for engineers are virtually absent from left-wing violent extremists and only present rather than over-represented among right-wing extremists.”
Perhaps, for Zubair, it was the conceited smugness in possessing an engineering degree that lured him to Awlaki who was also known as the “Osama bin Laden of the Internet”. Born in New Mexico to Yemeni parents, Awlaki was also a civil engineer who earned his degree from Colorado State University in 1994. In 2011, Awlaki was killed in a US drone attack in Yemen.
Between 2008 and 2009, Zubair, his elder brother and two others, “obtained money by opening credit cards and withdrawing money with no intention of repaying the amounts obtained from the financial institutions”. The money thus obtained through fraudulent means was meant for Awlaki and also to finance visits to Yemen to meet the top Al Qaeda terrorist.
The four were also charged of agreeing to participate in ‘violent jihad’ against the US and the US military in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere.
Also Read: US deports Al Qaeda terrorist Ibrahim Zubair to India
