[Daily Beast] Naomi Rodriguez is an emergency medical technician who works 12-hour shifts in the streets of The Bronx, so she immediately recognized the irony when the unremarkable-looking man who lived one floor above her was alleged to be a terrorist sleeper agent.
"I save lives, and here’s this one trying to take them," she remarked this week from the doorway of her apartment on West 238th Street in the borough’s Kingsbridge Heights section.
Neither Ali Kourani’s attire nor demeanor gave any hint of his religion or ideology.
| A scion of the clan described as the bin Ladens of Lebanon, he came to the U.S. for school after learning the basics of the terror trade as a teen. Here he studied biomedical engineering and got an MBA, then American citizenship on orders of Hizb’allah to become a sleeper agent while scouting potential Israeli and American targets. He and Samer el Debek, a fellow sleeper agent based in Detroit who scouted potential American and Israeli targets in Panama, were arrested on the same day... |
"How do you say, it’s just unexpected," Rodriguez added. "Very unexpected."
She recalled that at the time of his arrest last June,
| ...June 2017, actually... |
the news called 34-year-old Kourani "the Kingsbridge Heights Terrorist." But he was not just another lone wolf inspired to Islamic radicalism by internet hate sites and following online instructions to build a bomb in the kitchen of his mom.
As will become clear when he goes on trial Monday, this seemingly unremarkable man whom Rodriguez saw in the stairway is alleged to have been a longtime undercover operative for an international terrorist organization.
Kourani had allegedly been recruited as part of a plan to exact revenge for the car-bomb killing of a terror mastermind whom a former CIA agent called "probably the most intelligent, most capable operative we’ve ever run across, including the KGB or anybody else." Kourani was, by his own multiple admissions, trained in explosives and small arms, along with secure communications, survival and interrogation as a member of Hezbollah’s External Security Organization (ESO), also known as the Islamic Jihad Organization (IJO). Or simply 910.
"Or Hezbollah black ops," the FBI adds in court papers.
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Yet another slippery fellow; Paki IT guy Imran Awan and his Falls Church used car dealership. No charges other than 'Bank Fraud.'