Back from visiting the beach for a few days and I see that our Muslim fireworks enthusiasts have turned out to be not only bomb makers but bomb teachers as well:
Two Egyptian students enrolled at the University of South Florida have been indicted for carrying explosive materials across states lines. One of the defendants also is charged with teaching the other how to use them for violent reasons.
Ahmed Abdellatif Sherif Mohamed, 24, an engineering graduate student and teaching assistant at the Tampa-based university, faces terrorism charges for teaching and demonstrating how to use the explosives.
According to officials familiar with the case, Mohamed has been arrested previously in Egypt on terrorism-related charges. He is said to have produced an Internet video showing how to build a remote-controlled car bomb.
Mohamed and Youssef Samir Megahed, 21, also an engineering student, were stopped for speeding Aug. 4 in Goose Creek, S.C., where they have been held on state charges. Police found pipe bombs in their car near a Navy base in South Carolina where enemy combatants have been held. They have been held in a South Carolina jail while the FBI continued to investigate whether there was a terrorism link.
The men reportedly made police officer suspicious during a traffic stop when one of them tried to quickly put away a laptop computer. The computer was seized.
Mohamed faces up to 20 years in prison if convicted on the count of demonstrating how to make and use an explosive device. He and Megahed both face up to 10 years in prison if convicted of transporting explosives across state lines without permits.
Regular readers will remember the barrage of lefty comments in my posts above in which they tried to portray this arrest as only being about Driving While Muslim.
they bought some fireworks and got pulled over big deal. stop blowing it out of proportion because of what you saw on CNN.
Turns out my hunch and many of my fellow bloggers hunches were right all along. Doesn’t take a rocket scientist (pun intended) to figure out that two Muslims driving by a Naval Base with a laptop and explosives in the trunk is quite a bit more suspicious then just a few guys going model rocketing.
In South Carolina, where Mohamed and Megahed have been held in the Berkeley County jail, U.S. Attorney Reginald I. Lloyd praised state and federal authorities for cooperating in the four-week investigation that initially did not look like a terrorism case. “The arresting deputy’s vigilance and the immediate response of our local investigators and prosecutors are highly commendable,” Lloyd said in a statement. Since the Aug. 4 arrest, authorities sought to determine whether Mohamed and Megahed were fledgling terrorists or merely college students headed to the beach with devices made from fireworks they bought at Wal-Mart in their car, as they claimed. The local sheriff in South Carolina said the explosives were “other than fireworks.” The charges follow several searches in Tampa, including of a storage facility and a park where the explosives might have been tested, authorities said.
Of course in the eyes of CAIR these two were just some silly college boys out to have some fun:
An Islamic community leader from Tampa, Fla., who’s been in touch with the families of the two detained college students, told The Post and Courier that Megahed and Mohamed are not troublemakers and that they were simply on a weekend trip to North Carolina.
Ahmed Bedier, executive director of the Tampa chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a civil rights organization for Muslims, said family members have told him they think the materials were leftover fireworks Megahed kept in his trunk since July 4.
“Both of them are really naïve kids,” Bedier said.
Andy McCarthy on the apologists of terrorism known as CAIR:
The men are students at the University of South Florida’s School of Engineering, which Professor Sami al-Arian turned into an outpost of the terrorist organization, Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Now it turns out that at least one of them was either renting or about to rent a room in a house formerly rented by al-Arian’s World & Islam Studies Enterprise. Steve Emerson’s Investigative Project on Terrorism also reports that, according to sources close to the investigation, Ahmed Mohammed had previously been arrested in Egypt on terrorism charges. No word yet on how he was able to get into the United States with that history.
CAIR’s Bedier, after initially assuring us that the students were just a couple of "really naive kids" who happened to be driving around South Carolina with fireworks, changed tacks after state authorities filed pipe bomb charges — claiming instead that their arrest was suggestive of "profiling." Did I mention that Bedier was one of al-Arian’s top apologists? In 2006, when last we heard from him before this case, he was explaining that, because al-Arian had “stayed true to his convictions,” the professor would not be pleading guilty to any terrorism charges because, after all, “there is no conspiracy to support terrorism.” Immediately afterwards, al-Arian pled guilty to conspiracy to provide services to a designated terrorist organization.
Read the whole indictment here. Dan Riehl has some excellent research here.
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I had not read about these guys, good work bro.