Martial Arts Expert Pleads Guilty in Terror Case

[complete]

By ALAN FEUER
Published: April 4, 2007
A jazz bassist and martial arts expert charged two years ago in an elaborate undercover terrorism investigation pleaded guilty today to plotting to teach would-be Al Qaeda operatives how to wage jihad with hand-to-hand combat.
The man, Tarik Shah, 44, entered his guilty plea in Federal District Court in Manhattan. In exchange, he will receive a reduced maximum sentence of no more than 15 years.
The plea by Mr. Shah, who is from the Bronx, brings to a close his role in a wide-ranging federal sting operation that reached its height in May 2005 when an undercover F.B.I. agent posing as a recruiter for Al Qaeda met him in a ground-floor apartment off the Grand Concourse. There, the government says, Mr. Shah, a musician who grew up listening to Cannonball Adderley records, discussed a failed attempt to attend a terrorist training camp in Afghanistan and then, in words that were secretly recorded, pledged “bayat,” or allegiance, to Al Qaeda.
The government itself has acknowledged that neither Mr. Shah, nor three other plotters accused in the case — one of whom pleaded guilty on Monday — was on the verge of any violent act. But the case stood out because it stemmed, in some measure, from the work of a former jailhouse informer and evolved into a sprawling sting operation, complete with secret meetings, coded messages and talk of travel overseas for formal terror training in the name of jihad.
Mr. Shah first came to the attention of authorities in 2003, court papers show, when he began a relationship with a man he did not know was a federal informer. He told the man of his martial arts training and of his ability to teach “brothers” how to fight.
The government never revealed the identity of the informer beyond saying that he was convicted in 1990 of crimes related to a robbery; while behind bars he began to cooperate in terrorism investigations.
While Mr. Shah’s conversations with the informer piqued the interest of investigators, the interest intensified in December 2003 when police in Yonkers arrested him on charges unrelated to terror and discovered in a search of his car phone the telephone numbers of two men whom the F.B.I. had already identified as suspects in terrorism investigations.
Shortly after that search, he met again with the informer, who told him of a warehouse on Long Island that Mr. Shah could use for his martial arts training. Mr. Shah, the government says, was intrigued and offered the informer details of his own secret militant ambitions, claiming that his life as a jazz musician was his “greatest cover.”
Even while imprisoned and awaiting trial, Mr. Shah continued to practice his craft. He and his brother, Antoine Dowdell, a jazz pianist, would sometimes sing and scat in a special isolated visiting area of the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Lower Manhattan.
In early 2004, the informer, at the F.B.I.’s direction, told Mr. Shah that he had been in touch with a terrorism recruiter from the Middle East who had been looking for someone to train fighters in close-quarters combat. In March 2004, Mr. Shah and the informer took an Amtrak train from Pennsylvania Station to Plattsburgh, N.Y., court papers say, to meet with “the recruiter,” who in fact was an F.B.I. agent.
Mr. Shah told the undercover agent of a friend, Rafiq Sabir, an emergency room doctor with a Columbia University medical degree, who had worked in New York and Florida. The agent told Mr. Shah that the doctor’s skills could be used for jihadists who got hurt in training.
Dr. Sabir is awaiting trial. Abdulrahman Farhane, a Muslim bookseller from Brooklyn, has pleaded guilty to plotting to buy arms for Islamic fighters in Afghanistan. And on Monday, Mahmud Faruq Brent, a paramedic from Washington, entered a guilty plea to having attended a training camp run by the Pakistani terror group Lashkar-e-Taiba in 2002.
During the many months of the investigation, Mr. Shah had conversations about Osama bin Laden, according to the government, and about Mr. Shah’s interest in learning about chemicals and explosives.
“This has always been one of my dreams,” he said at one point about his proposed role as martial arts training, according a federal complaint.
Dr. Sabir, the government says, attended the meeting with Mr. Shah and the undercover agent two years ago on Grant Avenue in the Bronx. At the outset of the meeting, the government claims, Mr. Shah took care to assure everyone that the apartment was “safe.”