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Attempted Bomber's Story Comes to Light via Online Forum Posts

by Lee Bains on December 30, 2009 at 01:27 PM

The cover of the book that is Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab has "terrorist" written nowhere on it. The clean-cut, boyish face and the soft, timid eyes in the photograph above would seem more at home on the neck of a college classmate or fellow commuter than it would the shoulders of an Al Qaeda operative and attempted airplane bomber. If there is such a thing as a "typical" terrorist (and it's hard to say that there is), it would be difficult to peg the 23-year-old Nigerian as such. The trail he has left through social networking sites and online forums, and the very fact that such a trail exists, tells the story of a lonely, confused young man caught between the West and his native West Africa, his privileged raising and his spiritual ambitions, a peaceful faith and a violent devotion.

Thanks to the Global Terror Alert's Evan Kohlmann and Wired, the world is able to peer into a younger Abdulmutallab's heart via statements he posted to the forum at Gawaher.com, an Islamic community site, in 2005. All of the posts have been made available in a single .pdf document by Wired.

In these missives (all written in English, it should be stated), a teenaged Abdulmutallab discusses his studies, speaks warmly of classmates at his prestigious British boarding school (Muslim and non-Muslim alike), expresses a desire to please his father (a wealthy Nigerian banker), and begs for assistance in sorting out his theological and religious beliefs. "The last thing I want to talk about is my dilemma between liberalism and extremism," he wrote on January 28th, 2005. "[Anytime] I relax, I deviate sometimes and then when I strive hard, I get tired of what I am doing i.e., memorising the quran, etc. How should one put the balance right?"

The sentiments should be familiar to anyone who's been young, passionate, and confused. But what happened in these long five years? What turned a "very religious, polite, and studious fellow," as one cousin described him to MSNBC, into an attempted mass murderer? Alas, it will likely take more than IP address queries and forum posts to understand that. Said the cousin, "[It] was unthinkable that he would do anything close to bombing a plane." [From: Wired and MSNBC]

Tags: forums, Gawaher, Gawaher.com, message boards, MessageBoards, socialnetworking, terrorism, top, UmarFaroukAbdulmutallab, web

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