Is jihad pilot Adnan Shukrijumah dead or alive?

By Michelle Malkin
MichelleMalkin.com

I’ve written many times over the last decade about Adnan Shukrijumah, the FBI Most Wanted terror plotter and jihad pilot. Refresher: On the anniversary of 9/11 this year, I asked:

Black caliphate flags flap in the open air. Islamic head-choppers wreak bloody havoc around the world. Nearly a dozen commercial airliners disappear in Libya. And America’s immigration and entrance systems remain in shambles.

Now is a good time to ask a question I first posed 10 summers ago: Where is Adnan Shukrijumah? A decade later, the question is still unanswered. The FBI has yet to track down this homicidal plotter. Have you forgotten?

Saudi-born Shukrijumah, billed as the “next Mohammed Atta,” has been a fugitive since the 9/11 terrorist attacks. His father, Gulshair, was a Wahabi cleric funded by the Saudi government. The elder Shukrijumah headed mosques in New York and Miami, consorted with Israel-bashing black Muslim agitators, and also served as one-time interpreter for convicted 1993 World Trade Center mastermind Omar Abdel Rahman (the Blind Sheik). The radical Muslim apple didn’t fall far from the tree.

The younger Shukrijumah has been tied to al-Qaida training camps in Afghanistan and reportedly met convicted Muslim convert “dirty bomb” plotter Jose Padilla overseas. Gitmo detainee and jihad overlord Khalid Sheikh Mohammed identified Shukrijumah as a fledgling new cell leader. He allegedly trained under alleged terror financier Ramzi bin al-Shibh.

In September 2003, the feds put a $5 million bounty on Shukrijumah’s head. The FBI “Most Wanted Terrorists” bulletin warns he is “armed and dangerous.” Aliases: “Adnan G. El Shukri Jumah, Abu Arif, Ja’far al-Tayar, Jaffar al-Tayyar, Jafar Tayar, Jaafar al-Tayyar, Hamad.” The translation of Ja’far al-Tayar, Jaffar al-Tayyar, Jafar Tayar and Jaafar al-Tayyar? “Jafar the Pilot.”

One of these aliases linked the enigmatic man to the same Oklahoma flight school attended by convicted “20th hijacker” Zacarias Moussaoui. Shukrijumah reportedly undertook flight training in the late 1990s or early 2000 in Florida and secured a flying license for light aircrafts. He is rumored to have acquired bomb-making expertise, as well. Somehow and somewhere along the way, Shukrijumah obtained a legal U.S. green card.

Among the nightmare activities Shukrijumah has reportedly coordinated, according to the FBI:

“Conspiracy to Use Weapons of Mass Destruction; Providing Material Support to a Foreign Terrorist Organization; Conspiracy to Provide Material Support to a Foreign Terrorist Organization; Receiving Military-Type Training From a Foreign Terrorist Organization; Conspiracy to Commit an Act of Terrorism Transcending National Boundaries; Attempt to Commit an Act of Terrorism Transcending National Boundaries; Use of Destructive Device.”

In 2007, Shukrijumah’s name surfaced in wiretaps related to a busted New York City subway bombing plot. (Colorado jihadist Najibullah Zazi pleaded guilty to terrorism charges related to the “martyrdom operation” in 2010.)

In 2010, Shukrijumah was indicted in the Eastern District of New York for his alleged role in a terrorist plot to attack targets in the United States and the United Kingdom. According to the charges, senior al-Qaida leadership in Pakistan oversaw the conspiracy and a larger scheme by al-Qaida in Pakistan to use Western operatives to attack a target in the United States.

Law enforcement sources have placed Shukrijumah on the southern border, in Guyana, at a Trinidad jihadi compound, and at a meeting of Latin American gangs. Shukrijumah reportedly joined high-level jihad planners in Pakistan’s outlaw Waziristan province in 2004, which experts likened to the pivotal planning session in Kuala Lumpur that preceded the 9/11 attacks. “This was a meeting of a bunch of cold-blooded killers who are very skilled at what they do and have an intense desire to inflict an awful lot of pain and suffering on America,” a source told Time magazine at the time.

“He speaks English and has the ability to fit in and look innocuous,” an FBI agent noted. “He could certainly come back here, and nobody would know it.” The magazine added that “U.S. authorities have put his name on domestic and international watch lists but fear he will travel to Mexico or Canada on phony documents and then sneak across the border into the U.S.”

Bin Laden may be dead. But jihad lives. Our borders are wide open. Our fraud-riddled visa programs continue to be exploited. Tens of millions of visa overstayers, deportation fugitives and border-crossers go unpunished, undetected and unmonitored. And political correctness reigns. God help America the Unsecure.

This weekened, Pakistan officials “claimed” that Shukrijumah is dead after being targeted by its military:

On Saturday, the authorities finally caught up with Adnan Shukrijumah, al-Qaeda’s chief of global operations who had a $5 million (£3.2 million) bounty on his head. Shukrijumah, 39, died in a raid by Pakistan military on a compound in South Waziristan tribal area. He had been hunted down and killed.

US authorities had him on their most wanted list since 2010, while the justice department had charged him with ordering an attack on the New York subway. The same indictment links him to a plot to blow up shopping centres in Manchester, while he has also been implicated in attacks on the London Underground and to trains in Norway.

Shukrijumah’s role in al-Qaeda was to choose the targets and then recruit the terrorists to carry them out. The attacks on New York, London and Manchester were thankfully thwarted.

Confirmation of his death came from a Pakistan senior army officer. “The al-Qaeda leader, who was killed by the Pakistan army in a successful operation, is the same person who had been indicted in the United Stated,” he said.

Hmmmm.

Given the history of past dubious claims about other top al Qaeda leaders being killed and killed again, I’m taking the news with a grain of salt.