The Shadowy Trail and Shift to Islam of a Bomb Suspect

Jailed Briton

New York Times/December 29, 2001
By Alan Cowell

London -- He is a gangling giant of a man with immigrant roots in Jamaica, a record of crime and a sense that his Christian upbringing was not enough to shield him from the violence, poverty and racial bias of south London.

The profile fits Richard C. Reid, 28, the man accused of trying to ignite explosives-packed sneakers on American Airlines flight 63 from Paris to Miami on Dec. 22. It also fits his father, Robin C. Reid, 51, a man with whom he had little contact growing up but whose life seemed to be a model for the son's - until last week.

At a federal court hearing in Boston on Friday, an investigator testified that the explosives were powerful enough to have blown a hole in the plane.

Since his arrest there have been increasing indications that Richard Reid's travels in the last three years - to Pakistan, Cairo and the Gaza Strip - had dark purposes as well. On one such trip, according to British press reports, he may have met with Nabil abu Aukel, identified as a member of the Hamas terrorist group. Mr. Aukel was arrested in June 2000 by Israeli authorities and, in an indictment, accused of collaborating with Hamas and several Arab-Israelis on plots aimed at military and civilian targets inside Israel.

The indictment stated that Mr. Aukel, a Palestinian, had received training in explosives and chemicals at the Abu Khabab camp in Afghanistan in 1998. Israeli officials said at the time that Mr. Aukel's arrest was the first time Israel had uncovered an Al Qaeda cell inside its borders.

But if Richard Reid had grand ambitions in international terrorism, it was in stark contrast to the routine of his life in Britain where, until last week, he was very much his father's son, following a life of minor crime and a conversion to Islam, a faith that provided a new identity and a new name, Abdel Rahim.

His father and mother, Lesley Hughes, divorced for years, had little contact with him. Both said they believed that for the last three years he had moved to Pakistan or Iran, a period in which the British police say he spent little time in England. The British authorities, too, took scant notice of him, although, with hindsight, his clumsiness seemed almost devised to invite detection.

Neither was he, apparently, on any international watch list. "If you are asking me if, in a perfect world, could this man have been discovered, I expect in a perfect world he could have been," the British foreign secretary, Jack Straw, said today.

Even now, as Mr. Reid faces trial in the United States, his movements outside Britain since 1998 seem, in part, as mysterious as the source of the funds he used to pay for his travels, including the cash payment for his American Airlines ticket.

In an interview published today, Robin Reid discussed his relationship with his son, saying he had counseled him to convert to Islam, a course he himself had embarked on in prison as a comfort against racial discrimination. "I suggested to him, `Why don't you become a Muslim, they treated me all right,' " said Mr. Reid, whose parents came to Britain from Jamaica after World War II. "I don't feel guilty about encouraging him to be a Muslim because the sort of Islam I encountered wasn't about blowing up planes, it was about loving mankind."

What seems clear, too, is that Mr. Reid - 6 feet 4 inches tall to his father's 6 feet 8 inches - was either remarkably fortunate in his narrow escapes, or very skilled in deception.

On at least three separate occasions before Dec. 22, this lanky, unkempt man aroused official suspicions in a way not usually associated with hard-core terrorists. In July, before boarding an El Al flight to Israel, he was briefly detained and searched because his behavior seemed suspicious, according to the Israeli airline. Israeli officials said today that they were trying to reconstruct his activities in the five days he spent in Israel.

On Dec. 12, he renewed his British passport in Brussels, even though pages had been torn from his old one and a separate renewal application had been made in Karachi, Pakistan, earlier in the year, according to the British Foreign Office.

On Dec. 21, 13 years to the day since 270 people were killed when Pan Am flight 103 was blown out of the sky over the Scottish town of Lockerbie, he tried to board the American Airlines flight in Paris but was held up for questioning because he was carrying no baggage for the long flight. He was allowed to board the flight the next day.

For his parents, though, the first indications of their son's notoriety came when his photograph appeared in newspapers after his failed attempt to set fire to his shoes. His mother's lawyers issued a statement on Thursday in which she said she was "deeply shocked as any mother would be." His father said: "He's not a bad lad. I can't imagine him doing anything like this without being involved with somebody else."

The younger Mr. Reid was born in 1973, one year after his parents met while Robin Colvin Reid was working on the railroad and his wife-to-be, the daughter of an accountant and a magistrate from northeast England, was visiting London on a college- level study course.

A photograph taken when the son was 3 showed Mrs. Reid - who has now reverted to her maiden name, Hughes - barely reaching to her husband's shoulder and a curly- haired Richard sitting jauntily in the crook of his father's arm.

According to people who knew Richard Reid, he turned to Islam while serving a sentence for muggings at the Feltham Young Offenders Institute in west London.

Abdul Haqq Bakr, the chairman of the Brixton mosque in south London where both the younger and older Reids worshiped at different times, said Richard Reid was not an Islamic militant when he began attending the mosque after his release from prison in 1995.

But evidence seems to be building that the prisons themselves have become centers of Islamic fundamentalism, with the authorities acknowledging that since the Sept. 11 attacks they have suspended two of Britain's 130 prison imams for anti-American preaching. One of the suspended imams was identified as Abdul Rahman Qureishi, from the same Feltham Young Offenders Institute where Mr. Reid served his sentence.

Prison officials said Mr. Reid had been discharged before Mr. Qureishi took over as imam from his father.

The Brixton mosque figures significantly in Mr. Reid's story because he may have worshipped there in the same period as Zacarias Moussaoui, imprisoned in the United States as the suspected "20th hijacker" in the Sept. 11 attacks.

Worshipers at the Brixton mosque said today that a cleric accused of being a vital figure in Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda network by Spanish investigators also visited the mosque. The cleric, known as Abu Qatada, a Jordanian who has been convicted of terrorism in Jordan, usually preaches at a mosque in west London that Mr. Moussaoui is thought to have attended.

Abu Qatada, whose financial assets have been frozen as part of the crackdown on terrorism since Sept. 11, is a leading figure in what moderate British Muslims depict as an energetic network seeking to recruit Muslims like Mr. Reid to a far more radical kind of Islam.

The British police acknowledged Thursday that they may have failed to realize the perils of recruiters preying on people like Mr. Reid, vulnerable to the same message of victimization that lured his father.

"I became a Muslim because I was fed up with racial discrimination," the elder Mr. Reid said. "I suffered in the streets, even though I was born in London."

Mr. Bakr, the chairman of the Brixton mosque, characterized the younger Mr. Reid as "not stupid, but gullible."

According to officials at the mosque, Mr. Reid drifted away in 1998, about the time that he told his parents he was going overseas.

At that time, according to Mr. Bakr, he had begun to wear long Islamic robes combined with military jackets and had become more argumentative.

His mother told mosque officials later that she believed he was in Pakistan. But his father said today: "I met him for a chat and he told me that he was going to Iran. Soon after that he disappeared. I got a letter from him telling me that he was following the Muslim faith to the letter and that he was planning to stay there."

"He didn't say anything about jihad or holy war, but he knows that if he had I would have had a word in his ear. Religious violence just isn't on."

The older Mr. Reid said he had spent 18 of his 50 years in prison for car theft and burglary. After he and Mrs. Reid separated, Richard Reid lived part of the time with an aunt in south London. His mother moved to Somerset, a county in southwest England.

"My son didn't see his dad a lot of years because his dad was in prison a lot of the time," the elder Mr. Reid said. "But I don't think my criminal past has influenced him at all to get mixed up in terrorism."

There are reports that, between 1998 and 2001, the younger Mr. Reid fell in with Islamic extremists who gave him shelter in Pakistan. The fact that British officials said he applied for a passport renewal in Karachi would suggest he had been in Pakistan some time this year.

This summer, though, his trail also covered reported journeys to Turkey, Israel, the Gaza Strip, Egypt, Belgium and the Netherlands.

Both Mr. Bakr at the Brixton mosque and Mr. Reid's father depicted him as unlikely to have acted alone. "My son is a determined boy and I can imagine him being determined enough to blow himself to bits," the father said. "But I just can't believe that he would want to hurt anyone else in doing it unless, that is, he has been brainwashed."