CHICAGO (Agencies)
A leader of a Muslim separatist group was shot and killed by authorities in the Detroit area early Thursday as they moved to arrest him on federal criminal charges, the FBI said in a statement.
Luqman Ameen Abdullah, 53, was a leader in a group known as Ummah or "the brotherhood," a mostly African-American group of converts to Islam that seeks to establish a separate Shariah law-governed state within the United States, the FBI said.
The FBI said it employed "special safeguards" to secure the safe arrest of 11 men accused of operating an organized crime ring in the Detroit area who were known to have "espoused the use of violence against law enforcement."
Abdullah refused to surrender and began firing when he was confronted in a warehouse in Dearborn, Michigan, the FBI said in a statement.
Abdullah was killed during the exchange of gunfire but nobody else was hurt, an FBI spokeswoman said. |
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Highly placed Police enter the Masjid al Haqq mosque in Detroit, where Luqman Ameen Abdullah served as an imam An FBI criminal complaint described Abudulla as a "highly placed leader of a nationwide radical fundamentalist Sunni group consisting primarily of African Americans, some of whom converted to Islam while they were servicing sentences in various prisons."
The FBI monitored Abdullah for years with the help of informants who brought back taped conversations and stories of how he used the mosque to train his followers for a violent jihad.
Even the children were trained in martial arts, the informants said, and evidence of a shooting range was found in the basement when the congregation was evicted by the city of Detroit for non-payment of property taxes in January.
Their primary mission was to establish a separate, sovereign Islamic state within the borders of the United States that would be ruled by their spiritual leader, former Black Panther Jamil Abdullah al-Amin, who is currently in jail for shooting two police officers.
But the 45-page charging sheet describes how Abdullah allegedly used jihad to justify stealing cars, televisions, guns, fur coats and burning down buildings for the insurance money. |
