The 2009 Little Rock recruiting office shooting
took place on June 1, 2009, when the American Abdulhakim Mujahid
Muhammad, born Carlos Leon Bledsoe, opened fire with a rifle in a
drive-by shooting on soldiers in front of a United States military
recruiting office in Little Rock, Arkansas. He killed Private William
Long, and wounded Private Quinton Ezeagwula.
After his arrest, Muhammad acknowledged shooting
the men. He told police that he had intended to kill as many Army
personnel as possible. He had an SKS rifle, a Mossberg International
702 rifle, two handguns, 562 rounds of ammunition, and military books
in his car. Muhammad was charged with capital murder, attempted
capital murder, and 10 counts of unlawful discharge of a weapon.
Muhammad also reportedly faced 15 counts of engaging in a terrorist
act.
A convert to Islam, Muhammad had gone to Yemen in
2007 to teach English and study Islam, staying about 16 months. He was
deported from Yemen to the United States, after having overstayed his
visa and been detained.
In January 2010, Muhammad wrote to the judge in his
case. He claimed for the first time that he was sent on the attacks by
Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), and pleaded guilty to the
charges of capital murder. He had not consulted with his lawyers, and
no independent confirmation of his claim has been made. His father
described him as "unable to process reality".
The lead prosecutor for Pulaski County, Arkansas
said about Muhammad's attack, "If you strip away what he says,
self-serving or not, it’s just an awful killing, it’s like a lot of
other killings we have."
His shooting attack was the first of two in 2009 at
US military facilities. In the Fort Hood shooting in November, a US
Army psychiatrist shot and killed 13 and wounded 29 other soldiers.
Although a Senate special report chaired by the Independent Joseph
Lieberman declared it "the deadliest terrorist attack within the
United States since September 11, 2001" Nidal Malik Hasan was charged
with murder and was sentenced to death.
The Arkansas prosecutor took the Muhammad case to
trial in 2011. The defense lawyers said that the young man suffered "a
delusional disorder." During the trial, Muhammad changed his plea to
guilty and the prosecutor accepted it. On July 25, 2011, Muhammed was
sentenced to life in prison.
At trial, the suspect was charged by the state with
capital murder and related charges, not terrorism. Some terrorism
experts have noted a connection to other homegrown terror plots in
recent years, including targets, ideological motives and religious
inspiration. Other experts believe the stated ideological or religious
reasons maybe simply be a cover for personal problem.
Shooting
Attack
Muhammad drove by the Little Rock U.S. Army
recruiting center at 9112 North Rodney Parham Road near Reservoir Road
in a black 2003 Ford Explorer Sport Trac at 10:19 a.m. on June 1,
2009. Private William Andrew "Andy" Long, 23, of Conway, Arkansas, and
Private Quinton I. Ezeagwula, 18, of Jacksonville, Arkansas, were
standing outside the recruiting center in uniform, smoking cigarettes.
Muhammad saw them, approached, stopped his vehicle, and shot them with
an SKS rifle. The two victims had just completed basic training two
weeks prior, and volunteered to work as recruiters, which was not
their regular assignment.
A witness, Lance P. Luplow, heard approximately
seven loud bangs and then saw a black truck with tinted windows
speeding away, with its tailgate down spilling bottles of water onto
the street. Luplow ran to Long, who had been shot several times, and
was lying still in a pool of blood on the sidewalk. Ezeagwula was
crawling to the door, holding a bloodied ear. Ezeagwula exclaimed:
"Tell me this isn’t real, tell me this isn’t real". Other soldiers
came to treat the wounded, and performed CPR on Long. Long was dead
upon arrival at a hospital. Ezeagwula, who was shot in his back, head,
and buttocks, was rushed into surgery at Baptist Hospital in critical
condition.
Long's father later remarked: "They weren't on the
battlefield; but apparently, the battlefield's here."
Attempted escape
Muhammad sped away, planning to drive 150 miles to
Memphis, Tennessee, where he intended to switch cars. After a short
pursuit, Muhammad took a wrong turn in a construction zone, and local
police officers captured him eight miles from the recruiting center,
near the intersection of Interstate 30 and Interstate 630 near
downtown Little Rock. He surrendered to Little Rock police officers
without incident.
He stepped out of his SUV, wearing a green ammo
belt. He said: "It's a war going on against Muslims, and that is why I
did it". He used language "indicating an association with jihad", and
claimed that he had explosives, but none were found.
He was found to be in possession of an SKS rifle, a
Mossberg International 702 rifle with scope and laser sight, a .22
caliber handgun, a Lorcin L-380 semi-automatic handgun, 562 rounds of
ammunition loaded in magazines, homemade sound suppressors,
binoculars, a "suspicious" package, and two military books. A police
search of his apartment turned up Molotov cocktails, homemade sound
suppressors, and compact discs labeled with Arabic writing.
Motive and other targets
Muhammad said later: "I was trying to kill them."
He said he would have killed more soldiers, had more been there.
Muhammad said that he did not regard his action as
murder, because American military actions in the Middle East justify
the slaying of Americans. "I do feel I'm not guilty," he said to the
Associated Press, "I don't think it was murder because murder is when
a person kills another person without justified reason." Little Rock
Police Chief Stuart Thomas said, "At this point it appears that he
specifically targeted military personnel."
According to law enforcement officials, Muhammad
"had conducted research on other targets, including military sites,
government facilities, and Jewish institutions" throughout the
country.
Press accounts noted New York City military
facilities, such as the Times Square Recruiting Station, which was
bombed March 6, 2008, had been previously targeted for violence.
The suspect
The suspect, Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad,
previously known as Carlos Leon Bledsoe, was born on July 9, 1985 in
Memphis, Tennessee to Melvin Bledsoe, a businessman, and his wife
Linda. He has a sister Monica. Raised as a Baptist and considered a
"sunny child",[20] he graduated from Craigmont High School in Memphis
in 2003. He attended Tennessee State University in Nashville,
Tennessee, for three semesters.
At the age of 19, Bledsoe converted to Islam in
2004 at Masjid As-Salam, a Memphis mosque. He has said "I've loved
jihad ever since I became Muslim." He became more devout and prayed
regularly at the Islamic Center of Nashville, wearing Arab-style
clothing. By 2007 he was a deeply religious Muslim and had legally
changed his name to Muhammad.
Yemen (September 2007 – January 2009)
In 2007, Muhammad traveled to visit Yemen and
stayed there for about 16 months, ostensibly visiting to teach English
(at an institute called The British Academy, and other places in Aden
and Sana'a), to learn Arabic, and to further his understanding of
Islam.
Marriage and family
While there, in September 2008 he married Reena
Abdullah Ahmed Farag, a woman from South Yemen who worked as an
elementary school teacher. She was left behind when he was deported,
but he later sent for her.
Detention
In his handwritten letters of May to October 2010,
Muhammad claimed to have known people in Yemen who "showed him around
and helped him get started," but didn't say who they were or how he
met them, declining to do so for what he referred to as "security
reasons."
He claimed to have been "asked many times to carry
out a martyrdom operation in America", but "didn't have proper
training in regards to explosives." He said he tried to travel to
Somalia for weapons and bomb-making training, particularly
car-bomb-making. He wrote in 2010, "[H]ad I got this training my story
would have ended a lot differently than it's going to end now. My
drive-by would have been a drive-in, with no one escaping the
aftermath."
Muhammad was arrested at a roadside checkpoint in
Yemen on November 14, 2008. He had overstayed his visa, lacked the
proper government permissions to travel, and was holding a fraudulent
Somali passport. According to his 2010 letters about this period, in
his car were found explosive manuals that included tips such as how to
make gun silencers, literature by Anwar Al-Awlaki (the late cleric in
Yemen linked to Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula), videos and
literature about "Muslim soldiers in different parts of the world",
and "people's numbers on my phone that were wanted in Saudi Arabia."
Imprisoned for over two months in Yemen, Muhammad
said in his account that he was "maybe insulted in interrogation a few
times, but not tortured". He began planning to carry out jihad against
the U.S. while he was in prison. James E. Hensley Jr., Muhammad's
American lawyer after his arrest in the United States, later said that
he was radicalized by Islamic fundamentalists while in prison.
Under pressure from the United States, Yemen
deported Muhammad to the U.S. on January 29, 2008.[9] Because his
original plan to travel to Somalia for bomb training had been foiled
by his arrest in Yemen, Muhammad said he revised his plan "with the
help of the Mujahideen", the Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP).
Investigators have not independently confirmed his claims.
Return to the U.S. (January 2009–present)
After his return, Muhammad initially stayed with
his parents in Memphis. He moved to Little Rock, Arkansas in April,
where his father opened an office to provide a job for his son and a
chance for him to bring his wife from Yemen. His parents ran a
successful tour bus business ("Twin City Tours"), and he worked for
his father as a driver.
After his return, Muhammad was investigated by the
FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Force. The Task Force also investigated the
suspect's visit to Columbus, Ohio; authorities had monitored some
Somali Americans traveling from there to Somalia to "wage jihad."
Following his arrest and indictment, in January
2010, Muhammad wrote to the judge in his case and pleaded guilty to
the charges. After that, according to Muhammed's seven handwritten
letters from May to October 2010, which he sent to The Commercial
Appeal newspaper, he described his planning and activities related to
his June 2009 attack, which he claimed to have planned for weeks. He
claimed to have bought several guns secondhand to avoid FBI scrutiny,
stockpiled ammunition, practiced target shooting, and bought a
.22-caliber rifle at Wal-Mart to determine whether he was being
watched.
Muhammad said in his letters that none of his
attacks had gone as planned. His initial plan was to kill "3 Zionist
rabbis in Memphis, Little Rock, and Nashville. Then target recruitment
centers, from the South to the nation's capital. And other Zionist
organizations in the northeast." He used Google Maps to investigate
targeting recruiting centers in at least five states (including ones
in the cities of New York, Atlanta, Louisville, and Philadelphia),
Times Square in New York City; Jewish institutions (including in
Atlanta); a day-care center, a post office, and a Baptist church,
according to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
According to Muhammad's letters, he began his jihad
in Little Rock, doing "something" there. He drove to Nashville and
threw a Molotov cocktail at the home of an orthodox rabbi, but it
bounced off the target. He drove to an Army recruiting center in
Florence, Kentucky, because "it was near an interstate and bordered
Ohio. Easy to get away", but the center was closed.[9] He returned to
Little Rock, where he shot the soldiers at the recruiting station.
He was indicted on one count of capital murder and
15 counts of terrorist acts.
Mention in Congressional hearings
In a March 2011 Congressional hearing addressing
the issue of domestic radicalization of Muslims, Muhammad's father
Melvin Bledsoe, a business man from Memphis, spoke of his son's
descent into extremism. Bledsoe described his son's religious
conversion and travels to Yemen, where he had been “trained and
programmed” to kill. Bledsoe said, “Our children are in danger,” and
that, “It seems to me that Americans are sitting around doing nothing
about radical extremists. This is a big elephant in the room.” On an
earlier occasion, Bledsoe had said, "If it can happen to my son, it
can happen to anyone’s son.”
Legal proceedings
Muhammad was charged by the state of Arkansas with
capital murder, attempted capital murder, and 10 counts of unlawful
discharge of a weapon. Prosecutors sought the death penalty.
He was held in the Pulaski County Detention Center,
awaiting a scheduled February 2011 jury trial.[9] In January 2010,
Arkansas Judge Herbert Wright ordered the State's Public Defenders
Commission to pay part of the bill for Muhammad's private
attorney.[27] That same month, in a two-page, handwritten letter to
the judge in his case, Muhammad changed his plea to guilty. For the
first time, he claimed to be a "soldier in Al-Qaeda in the Arabian
Peninsula" (AQAP), and described the recruiting office shooting as a "Jihadi
attack." He said he was part of Abu Basir's Army, a reference to Naser
Abdel-Karim al-Wahishi, the AQAP leader in Yemen. Muhammad affirmed
that his sanity was intact, and that he was acting of his own volition
in changing his plea.
At the time the County Prosecutor Jegley said that
he was still intending to go to trial; he would have had to recommend
that Muhammed's plea be accepted for the court to do so. He said he
was not going to have the defendant determine the course of the trial.
Muhammad wrote at the time, “I wasn’t insane or
post-traumatic, nor was I forced to do this Act. The attack was
justified according to Islamic Laws and the Islamic Religion. Jihad—to
fight those who wage war on Islam and Muslims.”[2] Muhammad did not
discuss his change in plea with his lawyers ahead of time.
Discussing his claim of affiliation with the Al-Qaeda
group in Yemen led by al-Awlaki (killed in September 2011) and al-Wahishi,
he wrote in his letters of May to October 2010:
Far as Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula ... yes,
I'm affiliated with them.... Our goal is to rid the Islamic world of
idols and idolaters, paganism and pagans, infidelity and infidels,
hypocrisy and hypocrites, apostasy and apostates, democracy and
democrats, and relaunch the Islamic caliphate … and to establish
Islamic law (Shari'ah).
Investigators have not independently confirmed his
claim of AQAP affiliation. Muhammad's father Melvin Bledsoe said he
doubted whether his son had any such ties. Bledsoe described his son
as "unable to process reality" and being so "brainwashed" that he
wanted to tie his act to the terrorist group so he could face
execution and become a martyr.
Charges and trial
The lead prosecutor for Pulaski County, Arkansas
believed Muhammad acted alone, as did other law enforcement officials:
"If you strip away what he says, self-serving or not, it’s just an
awful killing, it’s like a lot of other killings we have." They and
his father Melvin Bledsoe said there was no evidence Muhammad was ever
in contact with Anwar al-Awlaki. Other men, such as the Fort Hood
shooter and Christmas Day bomber, had some communication with the late
al-Qaeda imam in Yemen. Before their attacks they had formed
radicalized views, but the Fort Hood shooter had other problems as
well. The Army has classified the Fort Hood shooting as workplace
violence.
In June 2010, Muhammad was charged with assaulting
an inmate with a weapon fashioned out of eyeglasses, after a similar
attack on a jail officer in April.
Both the prosecutor and Muhammad's lawyers wanted
to go to trial, which finally started in 2011. His lawyers defended
him on the grounds that he suffered "a delusional disorder." During
the trial, Muhammad changed his plea to guilty and the prosecutor
accepted it. On July 25, 2011, the judge sentenced Muhammed to life in
prison.
Significance
The suspect was noted in early press accounts as
among recent Muslim converts planning or carrying out violent attacks
that security experts called a disturbing new domestic trend. The
attack came less than two weeks after a foiled bomb plot on two
synagogues in Riverdale, New York, led by four men with records of
incarceration, drug abuse and mental illness.
Although the four men were originally identified by
some sources as having converted to Islam in prison or shortly after
their incarcerations, the New York Times reported that their religious
affiliation was uncertain, and they had never served together in
prison. Two had registered as Baptist and one as Catholic in earlier
prison terms; one said he had converted to Islam and another listed no
religion. They had no ties to any international terrorist
organization.
The New York Times noted of Muhammad's alleged ties
to Al-Qaeda, "If evidence emerges that his claim is true, it will give
the June 1, 2009, shooting in Little Rock new significance at a time
when Yemen is being more closely scrutinized as a source of terrorist
plots against the United States." No additional evidence at trial has
confirmed Muhammed's claims and he was not charged with terrorism. As
noted above, his father doubted his claims of affiliation.
Some terrorism experts thought there was a
connection in Muhammed's case to other homegrown terror plots in
recent years, including targets, ideological motives and religious
inspiration. Other experts believe the stated ideological or religious
reasons may simply be a cover for personal problem.
Wikipedia.org
|