Thread: Imam’s arrest stuns mosque members

FLAGLER MOSQUE
Imam’s arrest stuns mosque members

Flagler Mosque members defended their leader, who is accused of sending support to the Pakistani Taliban, saying he is too frail and too poor to support extremist activities.
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* Feds indict Miami imam, family members on charges of supporting Taliban

BY JULIE K. BROWN
jbrown@MiamiHerald.com

As dawn prayers were spoken just after 6 a.m. Saturday, FBI agents surrounded Miami’s oldest mosque, then banged on the door.

A man opened it. The agents were there with an arrest warrant.

The Muslim man explained that they were in prayer and could not be interrupted. He returned to praying. The agents, who had taken off their shoes before entering the mosque, waited quietly.

“No matter what kind of emergency, we do not break the prayer,’’ explained Shameem Akhtar, a mosque member who was there.

When the prayer was finished, agents arrested Hafiz Muhammad Sher Ali Khan, the 76-year-old imam of the Miami Mosque, more commonly known as Flagler Mosque. They charged that he and his family had funneled more than $50,000 to Pakistani terrorists over the past three years.

The imam spoke in a Pakistani dialect to others in the room as he was escorted out.

The idea that the soft-spoken, sickly prayer leader could have been involved in a conspiracy to murder, maim and kidnap terrorist targets seemed unbelievable to those who knew him. embers explained that Kahn lived with his wife in a tiny apartment near the small mosque, which was built 40 years ago from a converted house.

At the imam’s tiny apartment, an older woman in a white scarf hesitated to answer the door when reporters showed up. She indicated she did not speak English.

“What a stupid thing,â€

If they are supporting the enemy then good..arrest them. Mosques have always been and contunue to be the center of terrorism. It is there where they support, aid ,plan, fund and shelter terror activities. Any mosque found to be a center of such activities should be closed and leveld to the ground.