Cloud of Suspicion Hangs Over Toledo

Terrorism, or the suspicion of it, came to Dorothy Mehki’s neighborhood about 8:20 Sunday morning.

Her dog would not stop barking, so she opened the front door of her home in a middle-class suburb west of town to find an FBI agent standing in the middle of her street holding a gun. Carloads of agents were running in and out of a house across the street occupied by a family that had recently emigrated from Lebanon.

Mehki, a 73-year-old school bus driver, thought she was witnessing a drug raid. But her son said, “Mom, if that is the FBI, then those are terrorists.”

Sure enough, the raid on her street was related to Tuesday’s announcement that three local men had been indicted on terrorism-related charges. A few days earlier, apparently by coincidence, the government had ordered a crackdown on a Toledo charity suspected of ties to the Palestinian militant group Hamas.

Suddenly, this Rust Belt city joined the growing ranks of communities marked, at least in the public eye, as nesting places for terrorists.

Since the Sept. 11 attacks, the Justice Department has brought terrorism-related charges against people in Lackawanna, N.Y.; Portland, Ore.; and Torrance and Lodi in California, breaking up what it said were evolving terrorist cells.

For the communities, the prosecutions have been a jolt, with blaring headlines and grim statements from public officials and law enforcement leaders about the threat they say they have just extinguished.

On Wednesday, Toledo’s leading newspaper, the Blade, carried half a dozen stories on the arrests. TV reporters staked out a used-car lot run by one of the suspects that government officials said was intended as a cover for the terrorist scheme.

Muslim groups held a news conference at a local hotel the evening of the arrests to ask for tolerance and to head off a rush to judgment.

Toledo, a hardscrabble city of 350,000 people in the manufacturing heartland, might seem made to order for a terrorist cell. For one thing, the city -- like Detroit an hour to the north -- has a large Muslim population, which makes it easier, at least in theory, for terrorists to hide.

But Toledo’s Muslim community has a history of cooperating with law enforcement, which may have been the suspects’ undoing.

An FBI official credited local Muslim groups Tuesday with providing crucial information that led to the arrests. They declined to provide details.

Muslims and Arabs have been an established part of the community for years.

Toledo was one of the first cities in the country to have an Arab American mayor; the sheriff of Lucas County, which includes Toledo, is a third-generation Lebanese American. Its favorite sons include the late entertainer Danny Thomas and actor Jamie Farr of “MASH” television fame -- both of Lebanese descent.

That history muted any backlash against the Muslim community after the Sept. 11 attacks, said Mohammed Alo, a former Muslim student leader at the University of Toledo. Now a medical student in Chicago, Alo runs a website called ToledoMuslims.com.

“After 9/11, we had numerous meetings with the FBI,” Alo said. “We talked and kept in contact. We had a pretty good relationship. We did not expect to find anything like this in Toledo, but I guess sometimes things happen.”

In the lobby of the gleaming Islamic Center of Greater Toledo, one of the oldest and largest mosques in the country, its golden dome and spires visible from the interstate south of town, is a plaque that honors the names of every member of the mosque who has served in the U.S. armed forces, dating to World War I.

Imam Farooq Aboelzahab said some members’ children were serving in Iraq, which he said made the actions allegedly taken by the men arrested Tuesday particularly abhorrent to him.

“We are harming ourselves,” he said.

The arrests have prompted skepticism and surprise. The suspects appeared to be inept and clumsy and never got close to achieving the goal alleged in the indictment: aiding the insurgency against U.S. troops in Iraq.

Questions about whether the affair was nurtured by the government have surfaced because a federal informant was part of the scheming from the time it began in November 2004.

The suspects, who have pleaded not guilty, are Mohammad Zaki Amawi, 26, a former travel agency worker in Toledo who holds U.S. and Jordanian citizenship; Wassim I. Mazloum, 24, a Lebanese-born student at the University of Toledo who owns the used-car business; and Marwan Othman El-Hindi, 42, a thrice-married naturalized U.S. citizen who was born in Amman, Jordan.

They are being held without bond and face as much as life in prison if convicted.

The federal government said the men plotted to wage a holy war against U.S. soldiers and coalition forces in Iraq and elsewhere. They are accused of downloading incendiary videos from the Internet that show how to make explosives-laden suicide vests, and of researching how to make improvised explosive devices.

They are also accused of taking weapons training at Toledo-area shooting ranges, and of researching the idea of creating a phony “tax education” business as a way of raising money for their cause.

But the government said the plotters made the mistake early on of taking into their confidence a man the indictment described as “the Trainer,” who was retained as an expert advisor on explosives and other tactics. But the man was working for the government and tipped off federal officials in November 2004, the Justice Department said.

The government said the Trainer accompanied one of the suspects, Amawi, to Jordan in August 2005, where he was arranging for the delivery of five laptop computers that were intended for his “brothers” in Iraq. The computers were reportedly never delivered, although the government has not said why.

John Nutter, a terrorism expert at the University of Toledo, said the three suspects appeared to have had serious terrorist ambitions but also seemed to have lacked the credentials to pose much of a threat.

“If you look at what they did, some 90% of the indictment is about talking.... They were really quite amateurish about it,” Nutter said.

Lawyers and family members of the suspects were adamant Wednesday that the three men had been falsely accused.

Yassar Elkechen, the uncle of Mazloum, who is accused of planning to use his car business as a front for terrorist activities, said that his nephew was on the verge of getting out of the business because he was losing money, and that he was considering a job as a waiter or dishwasher at a steakhouse.

He said he never heard Mazloum discuss politics or war, and surmised that Mazloum might have met the other defendants while playing soccer or selling them a car.

Elkechen said Mazloum was the sole source of support for his mother, brother and two sisters who emigrated from Lebanon in 2000.

“He came here to avoid war and live in peace, have a good life and be free,” Elkechen said. “We believe 100% that he is innocent.”

On Tuesday, law enforcement officials rejected the suggestion that the suspects were not a danger to the country or that the case was less ominous than they first suggested.

They said the case was a perfect example of the preemptive law enforcement the public had been seeking from the government since the Sept. 11 attacks.

One law enforcement official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the pending indictments, said the government informant did not lead the men to do anything they were not ready and willing to do.

“The Trainer is the facilitator of actions that these people were predisposed to engage in,” the official said.

Mehki, the school bus driver, said her neighbors had a meeting Tuesday night to discuss steps they might take in response to the arrests.

She said some people suggested planting American flags in their yards as a show of patriotism, although she was not sure that sent the right message.

“I don’t want a whole yard full of flags in our yard to prove that we are Americans,” she said. “That is silly. There are good Americans and there are bad Americans.”