Friday, September 25, 2009 9:02 PM CDT
Imam glad Illinois man arrested for terror bomb plot
By the ASSOCIATED PRESS
DECATUR (AP) — The leader of the mosque attended by a central Illinois man jailed on suspicion of trying to detonate what he thought were explosives outside a federal courthouse in Springfield said Friday the FBI headed off what could have been a tragedy.
Imam Johnnie Shabazz said he didn’t get to know Michael C. Finton, 29, well in the more than two years he attended the mosque, a time in which Finton blogged about his quest for faith while in state prison, wrote to American-born Taliban soldier John Walker Lindh and, the FBI says, talked often about wanting military training while scouting for an American target to attack.
Shabazz said that he never saw the tall, redheaded Finton as a possible source of violence.
“He seemed to be someone who had his head on straight as far as I could tell,” Shabazz said. “But then we never really know.”
Shabazz said he wasn’t happy about the FBI’s methods — including placing someone in his mosque, according to the criminal complaint against Finton, and providing him with what he thought was a bomb inside a van.
But, he added, “We’re happy they saw the potential and took care of it.”
Finton, who also went by the name Talib Islam and lives in Decatur, was arrested Wednesday and charged with attempting to murder federal officers or employees and trying to detonate a weapon of mass destruction. Federal officials say the case isn’t connected with the major terrorism investigation under way in Colorado and New York or the Thursday arrest of a man on one of the same charges in Dallas.
Finton’s attorney has not returned calls for comment from The Associated Press.
No one interviewed Friday at the Masjid Wali Hassan Society of Decatur or in Finton’s neighborhood a block away from Millikin University seemed to know Finton well. Others interviewed at the restaurant where he was a cook wouldn’t give their names.
One man attending prayers Friday afternoon at the mosque said he’d seen Finton there and was upset that someone he had worshipped with might be involved in violent plot.
“It makes no sense,” Adam Judeh of Champaign, Ill. said. “This is a place for people to worship God.”
A couple of miles away at Seal’s Fish and Chicken, where the criminal complaint against Finton says he met with an FBI agent posing as an al-Qaida operative, one worker said he knew Finton mainly as a man who wanted to get married and open a painting or carpet business, but that he had changed in the couple of years he’d worked there.
Finton lived in a three-story apartment building a few blocks from the restaurant, a neighborhood of early 20th Century homes surrounding Millikin University. Residents of the area interviewed Friday said they didn’t know him.
He seems to have spent much of his time studying Islam, other religions and conflict in the Middle East.
Finton sporadically posted to a blog on his MySpace page, a collage that before it was removed from the Web included Islamic symbols, an English-language “Mujahideen Army” video as well as pictures of online friends and a quiz intended to determine the taker’s sex appeal.
One blog entry, Finton’s first, from January 2007, is a long essay on his search for religious faith.
In it, Fenton says that while in prison he studied faiths ranging from Christianity to Hinduism. He says he was raised as a Seventh-Day Adventist but also was familiar with Catholicism and other forms of Christianity from time spent in foster care. Finton writes that for a time he became a “bible-thumper,” going to church weekly and Bible study more often.
“It didn’t satisfy me,” he wrote. “So I moved on.”
In the FBI complaint, authorities say Finton talked about wanting to wage holy war.
Shabazz said Friday that, if Finton did intend to wage such a war, he did so from a position of ignorance.
“Finton, in my estimation, does not know enough about the religion to even use the words holy war,” Shabazz said.
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~STRANGER~ wrote on Sep 26, 2009 7:59 AM:
I wonder if a plea deal can be reached if he gives up his co-conspirators? "