Florida Professor Charged in Terrorism Case

A controversial South Florida professor and three alleged co-conspirators were arrested Thursday on charges of aiding a Palestinian terrorist organization in a case largely developed under expanded counter-terrorism powers granted by Congress to federal law enforcement authorities.

FBI agents were searching for four other men, believed to be overseas, who were also indicted by a federal grand jury on charges of being key members of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad. The organization has cells around the world and has been blamed for the deaths of more than 100 people in the Middle East, mostly through suicide bombings of civilians in Israel, Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft said.

The group, known as PIJ, “is one of the most violent terrorist organizations in the world,” Ashcroft said at a news conference held at Justice Department headquarters.

Ashcroft and other authorities alleged that the leader of the PIJ’s U.S. operations was Sami Al-Arian, the University of South Florida professor who was arrested at his home near Tampa.

Officials had been gathering information on Al-Arian for years, but it wasn’t until the passage of the USA Patriot Act that agencies were able to share information and build a case.

“We had surveillance on him for a long period of time and knew he was involved with key PIJ people. That was a given,” Robert Blitzer, former head of counter-terrorism for the FBI, said of Al-Arian. “With the passage of new legislation and the changes post-9/11, we finally had the opportunity to charge him and others like him.

“I think this is the shape of things to come,” Blitzer said. “We’re finally in a position from a law enforcement perspective to act.”

The indictment was handed up Wednesday in Tampa and unsealed early Thursday. FBI agents fanned throughout South Florida and Illinois, executing search warrants in at least six locations, seizing computers and other evidence.

In all, the eight men were charged with 50 counts of supporting and financing PIJ since as early as 1984, including being active in the group’s affairs and raising money to pay the families of men who committed suicide bombings.

Among the charges: operating a racketeering enterprise, conspiracy to kill and maim innocent people, conspiracy to provide material support to a group designated by the United States as a terrorist organization, interstate extortion, perjury and obstruction of justice.

Each faces life in prison if convicted on all counts, Ashcroft said.

For years, Al-Arian has been outspoken in complaining that an FBI investigation into his activities was unfair and motivated by prejudice against Muslims, and that he was being made a scapegoat for supporting Palestinian causes. During that time, Al-Arian vehemently -- and publicly -- denied aiding terrorist activities of any kind.

“It’s all about politics,” a smiling Al-Arian told reporters Thursday as he was led away by two FBI agents.

Al-Arian’s attorney, Nicholas Matassini, called the indictment “a work of fiction” and said his client was “a political prisoner” who began a hunger strike after his arrest and was accepting no food, drink or medicine.

Lawyers for the other men could not be reached for comment.

Also arrested Thursday in the Tampa area were alleged PIJ members Sameh Hammoudeh, 42, of Temple Terrace, Fla.; Hatim Naji Fariz, 30, of Spring Hill, Fla.; and Ghassan Zayed Ballut, 41, of Tinley Park, Ill.

Still at large were Ramadan Abdullah Shallah, worldwide leader of PIJ; Bashir Musa Mohammed Nafi of England and a PIJ founder; Mohammed Tasir Hassan al-Khatib, a PIJ treasurer; and Abd Al Aziz Awda, a PIJ founder and spiritual leader, authorities said.

On Thursday, Al-Arian, Hammoudeh and Fariz made their first appearance in federal court, where they were ordered held pending further criminal proceedings.

A detention hearing was scheduled Tuesday for Al-Arian.

Several Muslim organizations decried Al-Arian’s arrest as politically motivated.

The indictment, however, alleges in detail how Al-Arian and the other men knowingly raised money to help the PIJ commit acts of terrorism.

Al-Arian was PIJ’s leader in the United States, secretary of its worldwide council and a vocal and active proponent of its stated mission of pushing the government of Israel out of the occupied territories through violence and terrorist acts, the indictment said.

The legal document does not allege that Al-Arian or the others actively participated in acts of terrorism. But in its 121 pages, the indictment details how the men, particularly Al-Arian, discussed ways to help PIJ continue its terrorist acts and gain a higher stature among terrorist groups in the Middle East.

Much of that evidence was gleaned from wiretaps, informants and other top-secret information-gathering methods in the 1990s.

At that time, federal law prohibited FBI agents trying to build a criminal case against the men from using information gained through “foreign intelligence surveillance” operations from other agencies.

After the Sept. 11 attacks, Congress passed the USA Patriot Act allowing such intelligence information to be shared with law enforcement officials and prosecutors.

The dramatic expansion of the FBI’s powers was immediately challenged by civil rights groups, but an appellate court upheld its constitutionality last year.

After that court decision, senior Justice Department officials said Thursday, they began aggressively using the intelligence information to build a case against Al-Arian and the other men -- as well as criminal cases in a host of other investigations.

“We got dribs and drabs of [intelligence] information before that,” said one senior law enforcement official heading the PIJ investigation. “After that, the spigot opened.”

While this official said he was unaware of the breadth and depth of information gathered over the years, other senior FBI officials said they knew about it and were frustrated because they weren’t able to use it.

In one 1995 incident, for instance, Al-Arian wrote a fund-raising letter several days after two suicide bombers linked to PIJ killed 22 people at Beit Lid, Israel, according to the indictment.

In the letter, Al-Arian boasted about the attack, asked for money to help the families of the suicide bombers and “cited the bombing as example of what PIJ could do,” the indictment said. “In the letter, [Al-Arian] requested additional money so that operations such as Beit Lid could continue.”

The indictment gives many more examples of Al-Arian’s knowledge of PIJ’s connections to terrorist attacks. Even helping the group was illegal, authorities noted, since it had been designated by the U.S. government as a terrorist organization in 1995.

The arrests ended the long professional and personal limbo of Al-Arian, a tenured professor of computer science.

A father of five, Al-Arian has been on forced paid leave from his $67,500-a-year job since December 2001, and under investigation since the mid-’90s, when federal agents suspected his Islamic organizations were fronts for Middle Eastern terrorists.

In January, Al-Arian filed suit against the university, accusing president Judy Genshaft, who had been seeking to fire him, of discrimination because of his Muslim religion and Palestinian ethnicity. He has continued to deny that he has any connection with politically motivated violence, and labeled himself a victim of anti-Islamic hysteria whipped up by the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

The indictment was hailed by some who had questioned why the Justice Department had not acted sooner.

“Over the last eight years I asked the Justice Department what was happening,” said Stephen Flatow, a New Jersey man whose 20-year-old daughter, Alisa, was killed in a suicide bombing linked to PIJ and cited in the indictment. “But you look at the end product and you think, maybe it’s worth the wait.”

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Meyer reported from Washington and Dahlburg reported from Miami. Times staff writer Eric Slater in Chicago and researcher Anna Virtue in Miami also contributed.