The US government says that it’s looking for a 29-year-old Saudi Arabian citizen, Adnan Gulshair El Shukrijumah, who has not been charged with any crime but is suspected of having links to the al-Qaeda network and plotting attacks on the United States. According to both US and Panamanian law enforcement officials, El Shukrijumah’s trail leads back through Panama in early 2001.
Panamanian immigration records indicate that the man came here from the United States, where he was a legal resident, in April of 2001, then after a 10-day stay returned to the United States. American authorities say that he was last seen in Panama, but immigration records in Trinidad and Tobago suggest that he was there in May of 2001.
El Shukrijumah’s father, who is a prominent member of the local Muslim community in Miramar, Florida, told the Associated Press that the last he heard from his son was when the latter was teaching English in Morocco in 2002.
The younger El Shukrijumah holds Saudi and Guyanese passports, is believed by US authorities to use several aliases, and may also have passports from Trinidad-Tobago and Canada under some of these other names.
The US government is holding American citizen José Padilla in a military prison without charges (and apparently without much evidence) as an “enemy combatant,” who allegedly planned to set of a radioactive “dirty bomb” --- a chemical explosive device that is packed with radioactive material, so as to have the force of a conventional bomb but spread a deadly residue similar to the fallout from a nuclear weapon --- somewhere in the United States. Apparently because Padilla and El Shukrijumah lived near one another in South Florida in the 1990s, the FBI wants to question the latter in connection with the “dirty bomb” conspiracy suspicion.
(Padilla’s lawyers have cried foul, noting that the Bush administration has held press conferences to claim that Padilla has confessed to terrorist activities, but then in small-print footnotes to official documents noted that Padilla denied the things that he was said to have confessed. Because he is held incommunicado in a US Navy brig and has not been charged with any specific crime, Padilla’s lawyers complain, he is being unethically tried in the press without any opportunity to present his side of the case.)
Meanwhile, the Colombian magazine Cronos reports that the FBI is also looking at a Panama-based gold trading company, on suspicions that it was part of a network that provided the financing that allowed the September 11, 2001 suicide airliner hijackers to live in the United States for the several months prior to their attacks. However, there have been no charges filed or arrests or seizures made with respect to such allegations. In the United States there have been several raids against Muslim-owned gold and jewelry businesses, none of which have led to criminal charges related to al-Qaeda but some of which have led to arrests for immigration offenses.
Panama has a small and well established Muslim community, mostly with origins in South Asia or the Levant. Muslims here are mainly employed in commerce or the learned professions and generally get along well in society, including with this country’s Jews.
However, in July of 1994 a semtex explosive device went off in the hands of a mysterious Mr. Jaafar on a Colon to Panama City commuter flight, most of the passengers on which were Jewish merchants returning home from work in the Colon Free Zone. All 19 of those aboard were killed. The crime, which coincided with a devastating car bombing of a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires, has never been solved. Argentine, Israeli and US authorities have pointed to the Lebanese Hizbollah and Iranian backers in both attacks, but have never been able to prove that case.
The apparently coordinated attacks in Panama and Argentina would have been anomalous for Hizbollah, which has otherwise never attacked outside the Middle East, but would fit in with the al-Qaeda modus operandi of multiple simultaneous attacks, sometimes in more than one country, without any claims of responsibility.
At the time, however, the US and its allies were by and large unaware of al-Qaeda’s existence, which only came to public attention in 1996 when Osama bin Laden called for a holy war against the United States because of the presence of American military forces in Saudi Arabia. In the 1980s bin Laden was an ally of the United States in the war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, and his guerrilla force from which al-Qaeda arose received about $3 billion in military assistance from the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations.
Since the September 2001 al-Qaeda attacks on the United States, Panamanian authorities have shared information with their US counterparts and there has been a joint effort by the two nations and with Chile to beef up Panama Canal security. Though Panama has not sent any armed forces to participate in US military operations directed against al-Qaeda, it has been reported in the Panamanian press that some of our money laundering experts have lent a hand in the search for that group’s financial infrastructures.
However, despite widespread conjecture that we may have or have had a cell of bin Laden’s minions here, no hard evidence of al-Qaeda activity here has ever been revealed to the public. The claims about Adnan Gulshair El Shukrijumah are the closest we have ever come to that.
Also in this section:
Panama News Briefs
Search for al-Qaeda leads to Panama
Venezuela to hold a presidential recall vote
