As if the story of a Staten Island man getting arrested after admitting he'd tried to join the Taliban in order to get off the no-fly list weren't wild enough, now lawyers for Abdel Hameed Shehadeh are trying to suppress from court a 22-page FBI report in which the alleged wannabe spills his guts about his jihadi pals.
After being arrested for lying to the feds about a trip he took to Pakistan to join the Taliban, the Brooklyn-born Shehadeh, now 22, reportedly wouldn't stop talking. "At some point after stopping the interview, Shehadeh was asked what he was thinking about. [He] answered, 'How much I incriminated myself,'" the Daily News quotes the report as saying. And how!
According to the News:
The alleged rogues’ gallery he describes includes Brooklyn teachers of the Islamic orthodoxy Salafism, a livery cab driver, an Ethiopian Muslim in the U.S. Army and a College of Staten Island student who attended a fund-raiser at Brooklyn College for a terrorist.
Others he ID’d had delivered pro-jihadist speeches at mosques or ranted in online chat rooms, he said, and included a reputed member of the terror group Hamas who lives in Syracuse. Most bizarre is the homeless husband-and-wife—she comes from a wealthy family and he drives a luxury BMW sedan—who watched a beheading video with Shehadeh, according to an FBI report.
Now, apparently, Shehadeh is trying to backtrack and is claiming he was tricked into waiving his right not to incriminate himself. Which, considering we are talking about a kid who turned himself in for trying to join the Taliban, doesn't sound like it would be hard to do.
