June 14, 2012 |
The following article first appeared in The Nation.
It wasn’t long after he met the man called Shareef that Khalifa
Al-Akili began to sense he was being set up. Within days of their
seemingly chance meeting, Shareef was offering to drive Akili, a
34-year-old Muslim living in East Liberty, Pennsylvania, to the local
mosque for prayers. Shareef told Akili he was “all about fighting” and
“had a lot of resources at his disposal.” But when Shareef began to
probe Akili about his views on jihad and asked him if he could obtain a
gun, Akili grew nervous.
“I begin to try to avoid him, but would still
see him due to the fact that he lived two minutes’ walking distance from
my apartment,” Akili said later. In January of this year, Shareef
showed up with a “brother” who called himself Mohammed and was keen to
meet Akili.
Mohammed told Akili that he was a businessman from Pakistan
involved in jihad. “He kept attempting to talk about the fighting going
on in Afghanistan, which I clearly felt was an attempt to get me to talk
about my views,” Akili recalled. “I had a feeling that I had just
played out a part in some Hollywood movie where I had just been
introduced to the leader of a terrorist sleeper cell.”
