A former Boston cabdriver who allegedly admitted training in an Afghanistan terrorist camp was charged yesterday in federal court in Minnesota with lying to the FBI about helping a convicted terrorist get a Massachusetts driver’s license. Mohamad Kamal Elzahabi, 41, a Lebanese national, is charged with lying about providing support to Raed Hijazi in 1997 and 1998, when both were working as taxi drivers in Boston, according to a complaint and FBI affidavit unsealed yesterday in US District Court in Minnesota. Hijazi was later convicted in Jordan of the failed millennium bombing plot that targeted American and Israeli tourists in that country. The complaint also charges Elzahabi with lying to federal agents by denying he had shipped radios and other communications equipment to Pakistan between 1995 and 1997. Elzahabi, who has been held in New York since his arrest in May, will be transferred to Minneapolis to face the two counts of making false statements to federal investigators. Elzahabi, who lived at 15 Appleton St. in Everett from 1997 to 1998, was placed on an FBI "watch list" of 300 people in the weeks after the 9/11 terrorist attacks because of his relationship with Hijazi, the Globe reported in October 2001. He was not among the seven suspected terrorists sought by US authorities in May.
The affidavit unsealed late yesterday details a relationship between Elzahabi, Hijazi, and Bassam Kanj, who allegedly had links to Osama bin Laden. The relationship began in Afghanistan and continued when all three came to Boston in the late 1990s and worked as cab drivers. In January 2000, Kanj was killed leading an attack by Lebanese militants against an army division in the mountains outside Tripoli. Two days after the battle, Al Safir, a leftist newspaper in Beirut, identified Kanj as a bin Laden operative who had recruited 200 young men to his network during 1999 alone. When questioned April 18 by the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force about his relationship with Hijazi when they worked in Boston, Elzahabi first said that "he saw Hijazi sleeping in a cab, but denied knowing him very well," according to the affidavit. Elzahabi told agents that he had joined a jihad military training camp and fought in Afghanistan in 1988 and 1989 and that while he was there he met, Hijazi, Kanj, and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian Al Qaeda associate who is believed to be directing terrorist attacks against US and coalition forces in Iraq, the affidavit says. Elzahabi said that he and Hijazi "were not close friends or associates" and denied helping Hijazi get a Massachusetts driver’s license or letting him live at his Everett apartment and collect his mail there, according to the affidavit. But records from the Massachusetts Registry of Motor Vehicles show that Elzahabi was listed as Hijazi’s sponsor when he obtained his driver’s license Oct 10, 1997, the affidavit says.
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Another resident of the Everett apartment building where Elzahabi used to live told investigators that he accidentally opened a letter in the fall of 1997 that was addressed to 15 Appleton St. and found Hijazi’s license inside. The affidavit says the resident was going to send it back to the Registry, but Elzahabi told him that Hijazi was using his address. Although the affidavit says Elzahabi lived in Everett between 1997 and 1998, a Boston cab company official said Elzahabi had been issued a Boston hackney license in 1995. The license remains active, which would allow him to still rent a taxi. During his interviews with the FBI, Elzahabi said he came to the United States in 1984 on a student visa and paid a Houston woman to marry him so he could obtain legal permanent residency. They were divorced in 1988. After attending a religious conference in the Midwest in 1988, Elzahabi told agents, he traveled to Afghanistan via Pakistan to train at the jihad military camp, the affidavit says. Between 1991 and 1995, Elzahabi admitted, he worked in Afghanistan as a sniper in combat and "an instructor in small arms and sniper skills for other jihadists attending the Khalden training camp in Afghanistan," the indictment says.
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Elzahabi admitted personally knowing Khalid Sheikh Muhammad, who later became Al Qaeda’s leading operation planner and organizer, according to the affidavit. In 1995, Elzahabi said, he returned to the United States because he needed medical care for an abdominal gunshot wound he suffered in combat.
He lived in New York City for the next two years. Between 1999 and 2000, he served as a sniper in Chechnya, reentering the United States in mid-August 2001, when he moved to Minneapolis, according to the affidavit. Elzahabi denied that he shipped communications equipment to Pakistan while working at a business called Drive Axle Rebuilders, but acknowledged that he had accepted shipments for other people without knowing what was inside the packages, the affidavit says.
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The complaint charges that Elzahabi had large quantities of walkie-talkies "suitable for communications in extreme rural locations without regular or even cellular telephone service" shipped to him at the New York business. Elzahabi is accused of then shipping the equipment to Pakistan. The affidavit says some of the equipment was recovered in Afghanistan by US military forces after Sept. 11, 2001. Gail Marcinkiewicz, a spokeswoman for the FBI’s Boston office, declined to comment on the investigation being handled by the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force in Minneapolis. "It’s an ongoing matter," she said.
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