The strange saga of Abdullah al Muhajir, a/k/a Jose Padilla, took yet another turn this morning, when Internet gumshoes Fuckedworld and Junkyardblog spotted his look-a-like . . . guess where?
In the police drawing of a still-missing Oklahoma City bombing suspect, that’s where. Al Muhajir, held since May 8 on accusations that he intended to build and detonate a dirty bomb, is the spitting image of the mysterious John Doe 2, featured in police sketches and long touted by cops as a principal along with Tim McVeigh. Some law enforcement officials have insisted no such suspect ever existed, though witnesses described the second figure getting out of the rental truck with McVeigh seconds before the explosion.
However speculative, this clicks in more ways than one, since McVeigh’s lawyer tried to argue in Federal District Court in Denver that the 1995 plot may have had roots in the Philippines among men known to have been Al Qaeda operatives with direct ties to Osama bin laden. Though the judge rebuffed his argument, attorney Stephen Jones said he found people in the Philippines who claimed accomplice Terry Nichols met with terrorists there in the years before the 1995 attack.
Related Story:
“Terry Nichols’s Filipino Connection: Manila Enveloped in Oklahoma Bombing Case” by James Ridgeway