Wadih El-Hage - Militancy

Militancy

At an Islamic conference in Oklahoma in December 1989, el-Hage met Mahmud Abouhalima, who was later convicted for his part in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. El-Hage's prosecutors say that Abouhalima told el-Hage to buy a .38 caliber revolver, that he did so, and that El Sayyid Nosair used that revolver to kill Rabbi Meir Kahane.

Prosecutors have also suggested that el-Hage and Jamaat ul-Fuqra were involved in the murder of Dr. Rashad Khalifa on January 31, 1990 in Tucson. They believe that el-Hage knows who killed Khalifa. And even if el-Hage was not himself involved, the prosecution asked why he had not told them what he knew. El-Hage's family says he was not in the country at the time of the murder.

At some later point el-Hage moved with his family to Arlington, Texas. He was called to the Brooklyn charity Alkifah Refugee Center, by the group's office in Tucson, via el-Hage's mosque in Arlington. Family members acknowledge that he was in contact with the Alkifah group, and say that he was called in to mediate a dispute. A week later, the group's leader Mustafa Shalabi was found stabbed to death in an apartment that he shared with Abouhalima. This murder is unsolved. El-Hage's family said that he cried when he heard that Shalabi was dead.

In January 1992, el-Hage was arrested for writing false checks. In the car with him was Marwan Salama, whose phone records show his contact with the conspirators of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

Shortly thereafter, el-Hage moved his family to Sudan and worked as a secretary for Osama bin Laden, who operated a network of businesses and charities, some of them fronts, in East Africa at the time. El-Hage often travelled to Europe in this capacity. Prosecutors believe that el-Hage became a key aide to Bin Laden. They also believe that he was trying to obtain chemical weapons for the terrorist group. Little public evidence has emerged from Sudan for these claims.

In 1994, his wife April convinced el-Hage to leave Sudan and stop working for Bin Laden's organization there. As his mother in law said, "April would have none of that. She is Muslim, but she is also American, and she wouldn't stand for it." But prosecutors believe that el-Hage continued to work for bin Ladin's organisation in Nairobi, Kenya. In Kenya, he became the director of Help Africa People, a Muslim charity organization, which Kenyan documents say helped control malaria. El-Hage also made money off in the jewelry business. Prosecutors say that el-Hage was in contact in Kenya with Abu Ubaidah al-Banshiri, who was al-Qaeda's #2 member until his death in 1996. The badly wanted al-Qaeda suspect Fazul Abdullah Mohammed moved in and worked at the house as a secretary. A letter, thought to be from Mohammed, suggests el-Hage was the "engineer" of this East African cell. Yet another al-Qaeda member, Mohammed Saddiq Odeh admitted knowing el-Hage in Nairobi, and said that el-Hage attended his wedding.