Where Fear, Suspicion Trade Glances

The darting eyes tell the story. Every day at noon, men and women of every shape and shade arrive at a two-story, aluminum-sided house on Lilley Street.

They come from all over town, some nervous, scanning the parking lot, studying strangers before going inside. As if to check whether someone is watching.

In small, uneven letters on the front of the house are the words “Islamic Center of Moscow.” The house is mosque and meeting place for about 40 Muslims who attend the University of Idaho.

The lives of the students and, in more subtle ways, the life of this once happily insulated town in the Idaho Panhandle changed on Feb. 26.

That was the day when the Muslim group’s leader, Sami Omar Al-Hussayen, a computer science student, was arrested by a small army of federal agents. The popular Al-Hussayen, known by townspeople as Sami, is accused of promoting and funding terrorist groups and is depicted by investigators as only a few phone calls removed from Osama bin Laden. He’s being held in an isolation cell in a jail outside Boise.

The Muslim students feel scrutinized by townspeople who stare or glance furtively, and by federal agents who -- the students are convinced -- are monitoring them, said Marwan Mossaad, a 25-year-old Egyptian national who has emerged as the group’s new leader. He was the only one willing to be interviewed.

Said Mossaad: “We know our phones are tapped.”

Not long ago, in the post-Sept. 11 equation of us vs. them, the Muslim students here were accepted as loyal guests. But since Al-Hussayen’s arrest, three other men with ties to the house on Lilley Street have been taken into custody, and each arrest has added to the suspicion many residents now feel toward the Muslims in their midst.

“On the surface, it doesn’t look like much has changed here,” said Jason Transtrum, a landscape architecture student. “But in the back of people’s minds, maybe in the back of my mind, you look at some of these guys and think, ‘What are they really thinking about?’ ”

U.S. Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft, in a news conference Thursday, said federal agents have arrested terrorist suspects in cities all across the country, from Buffalo, N.Y., to Portland, Ore. Moscow was the smallest town on the list. The arrests mark a new reach of the war on terrorism into rural America.

The town’s 18,000 residents, mostly students, bump elbows at the same supermarkets and wake up every day in a place where the tallest building is the Latah County grain elevator on the south end of Main Street. Violent crime is still a shock.

“Murder rate?” said Moscow Police Chief Dan Weaver. “We don’t actually have a rate.”

The community sits in the middle of a geographic anomaly called the Palouse: 4,000 square miles of rolling, tree-less hills that act as immense buffers. The isolation makes for a kind of familial intimacy in which duplicity can feel like personal betrayal, which is what Robert Hoover, then the University of Idaho president, expressed on the day of Al-Hussayen’s arrest.

“We feel betrayed,” Hoover said.

His comment drew protests, and he later apologized. Other community leaders scrambled to change the message to one of “let’s wait and see” until Al-Hussayen’s trial.

But wonder and suspicion, exacerbated by the war in Iraq, have breached the polite facade in off-the-cuff statements, in letters to the editor, in over-the-fence chats between neighbors, in widely circulated e-mails.

“The implications of this thing are big,” Moscow Police Capt. David Duke said. “People are anxious to know what was going on, if there was a serious plot happening here.” The unknowns, Duke said, have “kept people on edge.”

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The anxiety has been fed by FBI statements that indicate the alleged crimes are more far-reaching than what can be made public before trial.

“We are not at the end of the trail, we are at the beginning of the trail,” Chip Burrus, an FBI special agent in charge, told a packed City Council chamber on the day of the arrest.

Al-Hussayen, a 34-year-old Saudi national, married with three children, is accused of promulgating terrorist ideology, using as many as 14 Web sites, Ashcroft said, to advocate “terrorism through suicide bombings and using airplanes as weapons.”

He’s also accused of using an Islamic charity as a front to funnel hundreds of thousands of dollars to radical Islamic groups. He’s charged with visa fraud and making false statements to the government, and if convicted could spend the rest of his life behind bars.

A trial date has not been set.

The three other men -- including a former University of Idaho football player -- were arrested out of state, and a fourth man, a onetime lecturer at the school, fled to Saudi Arabia.

Kris Wilson, mother of two children who used to play with Al-Hussayen’s kids at the school’s married-student housing complex, said she was as stunned as anybody. “He was such a nice man,” Wilson said. “Now there’s all this wondering going on: ‘Oh yeah, I saw that guy with Sami once, I wonder if he’s connected?’ ”

A tall, rangy man with a long beard and expressive eyes, Al-Hussayen was well-liked, respected and trusted as “one of the good guys.” He had been a doctoral student at the university since 1999. After Sept. 11, Al-Hussayen gave blood for the victims and marched in a peace rally. He condemned the attacks and spoke about the peaceful nature of Islam.

During this time, federal agents, acting on tips, tapped Al-Hussayen’s phones and intercepted his Internet communications.

The investigation culminated in a dramatic predawn raid on Feb. 26. Roughly 100 agents in more than a dozen sport utility vehicles descended from the hills into this slumbering town and took Al-Hussayen away.

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“It’s time that Moscow woke up to the fact that ‘they’ are among us,” resident Jackie Reed wrote in a letter to the Moscow-Pullman Daily News. “As far as those Muslim students and illegals who still reside in America, if they are ‘uncomfortable’ with justified suspicion, there’s an airport in Pullman.”

The town and university newspapers each received a handful of such letters.

Muslim students have reported receiving hostile e-mails from other students. In an open letter published in the university paper, the school’s acting president, Brian Pitcher, acknowledged the tension but said such actions “will not be tolerated.”

At the same time, university administrators say they plan to do better background checks on foreign applicants to the school and keep better track of them once they’re enrolled.

Immediately after Al-Hussayen’s arrest, all of the university’s Saudi students (between 10 and 15) and many other Muslims were questioned by federal agents. The students have retained attorneys “just in case,” Mossaad said.

“There’s fear more of us will be taken,” he said. Some Muslim students have left the university, he said, and others are thinking of doing the same.

“These people are afraid to e-mail, to talk to strangers, to even come out of their apartments,” said Liz Brandt, a law professor who has counseled the students. “We haven’t physically put them in internment camps, but we’ve imprisoned them by fear.”

The students still come to the house on Lilley Street for noon prayer. Some drive, others walk or ride their bikes. A ragged row of bicycles leans against the front of the house.

On this day, Mossaad circles the house to see whether it has been vandalized, looking it over from top to bottom, and then makes a final sweep with his eyes across the neighborhood before he enters and closes the door.