Feds: Son of slain Mich. Islamic leader arrested

updated 4:58 p.m. ET Oct. 29, 2009

DETROIT - Authorities captured the son of the slain leader of a radical Detroit-area Islamic group in Canada on Thursday, a day after the FBI arrested several members and a raid at a suburban warehouse ended in gunfire.

The FBI asked for the public's help in catching two of the 11 suspects in the case still at large, and they emphasized that the group, a faction of the radical U.S. Sunni Islamic group Ummah, held beliefs that were not at all representative of mainstream Islam.

"Any Muslim who took a look at what these people believed would not recognize this as the Muslim faith," Andrew Arena, the head of the FBI in Detroit.

Local police arrested Mujahid Carswell, the 30-year-old son of slain group leader Luqman Ameen Abdullah, across the Detroit River in Windsor, Ontario, where he lived, the FBI said.

Abdullah, 53, was killed during a shootout Wednesday with federal agents. He was one of 11 people named in a criminal complaint. The charges included conspiracy to sell stolen goods and illegal possession and sale of firearms.

Arena on Thursday declined to offer any other details about the raid.

"This is obviously something we don't relish. But in the end, we take solace that we took some bad people off the street," he said.

Nobody charged with terrorism
Neither Abdullah nor his co-defendants were charged with terrorism. But he was "advocating and encouraging his followers to commit violent acts against the United States," FBI agent Gary Leone wrote in an affidavit filed with the 43-page complaint Wednesday.

The FBI said Abdullah, also known as Christopher Thomas, was an imam, or prayer leader, of a faction of a radical group named Ummah whose primary mission is to establish an Islamic state within the U.S.

"This is a very hybrid radical ideology. I don't know that I'd call it a religion," Arena said.

Ummah is a movement with no central religious authority, so it's impossible to say what the group's factions teach in their mosques.

Abdullah told followers that it was their "duty to oppose the FBI and the government and it does not matter if they die" and to "simply shoot a cop in the head" if they wanted the officer's bulletproof vest, Leone wrote in the court filing.

The affidavit also said bombs, guns and even the recipe for TNT were among Abdullah's regular topics with his allies. Group members and former members said they were "willing to do anything Abdullah instructs and/or preaches, even including criminal conduct and acts of violence," the FBI agent wrote.

Eight of the 10 people charged with Abdullah were in custody, including a state prison inmate. Another man not named in the complaint also was arrested.

Two others still at large
Two suspects were still at large: Yassir Ali Khan, 30, of Warren, Mich., and Ontario, and Mohammad Philistine, 33, of Ontario.

The FBI's harsh portrayal of Abdullah doesn't match what Dawud Walid, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations' Michigan chapter, said he knew of him.

"He would open up the mosque to homeless people. He used to run a soup kitchen and feed indigent people," Walid said. "I knew nothing of him that was related to any nefarious or criminal behavior."

Walid said Abdullah had a wife and children. A phone number for the family had been disconnected.

Ummah believes that a separate Islamic state in the U.S. would be controlled by Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin, formerly known as H. Rap Brown, who is serving a life sentence in a federal prison in Colorado for shooting two police officers in Georgia in 2000, Leone said.

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