2002 Book Investigates Al Qaeda's U.S. Birth
Did rabbi's 1990 assassination mark birth of Islamic terror in America?
Aug. 16, 2002 -- The headlines that followed the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon screamed tragically of a "changed world." But did that change actually begin a decade earlier, with the assassination of a radical rabbi in New York City?
In his newly released book, The Cell, 20/20's John Miller teams up with investigative reporters Michael Stone and Chris Mitchell and gives a blow-by-blow account of terrorist events leading up to Sept. 11. They trace a trail of terror back to 1990, and ask whether U.S. intelligence agencies could have done something to prevent the Sept. 11 attacks.
On Nov. 5, 1990, a small crowd had gathered in a New York City hotel to hear a speech by Rabbi Meier Kahane, the founder of the radical Jewish Defense League. But one person in the crowd had not come to listen. He had come to kill.
As Kahane spoke to supporters after his speech, shots rang out. By the end of the night, the rabbi was dead from a gunshot wound to the neck.
The gunman was El Sayyid Nosair, who was wounded in a gunbattle with police as he tried to flee the scene and was arrested.
A police search of Nosair's home yielded a "treasure trove of information," according to Ed Norris, then the chief of New York Police Department detectives.
What they found were clues to an Islamic terrorist cell operating on U.S. soil — Arabic-language terrorist manuals, bomb-making instructions, videotapes and photographs of New York City landmarks.
"We knew we had something — something substantial, something unusual," said Norris. "This was not just a lone gunman who was nuts and decided to kill someone in a ballroom."
Islamic terrorism had come to the United States.
The files found at Nosair's home were taken from police by the FBI but, incredibly, were not translated until years later. The investigation was then entrusted to the Joint Terrorism Task Force, an elite group of FBI agents and New York police officers.
House of Worship Used for Terror?
The JTTF had surveillance photographs of Nosair at the El Farooq Mosque in New York's Brooklyn borough. Investigators believe the mosque a center for the preaching of jihad, or holy war, in the United States.
"Anytime anything happened in the early 1990s," said Tommy Corrigan, a JTTF detective, "you were coming back to the Farooq Mosque."
The mosque had become a gathering place for Islamic radicals led by a fiery blind cleric named Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman. Abdel-Rahman had just been released from an Egyptian prison after being tried and acquitted on charges in connection with the 1981 assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat. Now he was in the United States preaching jihad against America.
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