Aman Hassan Yemer (centre) arriving for a court hearing in Sargodha

“The last time I saw my son he was in his bedroom playing Xbox 360,” recalls 42-year-old Hassan. “The next day he just left with a group of friends, then called in the afternoon and said he was somewhere playing basketball.”

It was hardly an alarm bell, an American teenager playing computer games and basketball on a quiet weekend last November, just after Thanksgiving. But 18-year-old Aman Hassan Yemer would not return to his home in Alexandria, Virginia.

Instead, he and four friends surfaced thousands of miles away in Pakistan, where they have since been indicted on terrorism charges.

“I was just amazed by this news,” recalls Hassan, who asked the BBC not to use his full name. “He didn’t even take any luggage or clothes, so it’s kind of hard to swallow.”

This is the first interview any of the US-based relatives of the suspects has agreed to.

‘Quiet boy’

Hassan, an Ethiopian-born American citizen, insists his son is no terrorist.

My son has become a soccer ball between two teams – he’s in a bad, bad situation right now Hassan, father of one of the detained

“My son is just a quiet, very nice Muslim,” he states, when asked whether Aman showed signs of a radical Islamist mentality. “I never, never had signs or symptoms. He’s simply a listener and follower type.”

Arrested in the north-eastern Pakistani city of Sargodha last December, the suspects were indicted on 17 March of conspiring to commit terror attacks on Pakistani soil, of funding banned jihadist groups, and of conspiring to wage war against a national ally of Pakistan, a reference to Afghanistan. They deny the charges.

An earlier police interrogation report alleged that the suspects, aged between 18 and 25, “were of the opinion that a jihad must be waged against the infidels” and that one of the accused, Ahmed Abdullah Minni, had received instructions via YouTube from a militant recruiter.

After the young Americans went missing, it emerged that one of them had left behind a video expressing radical views.

That is when their families contacted the US authorities. Later, when the families learned that their sons were staying in Sargodha, at the house of a relative of one of the group, they gave the location to the FBI.

“They thought that by going to the FBI, if their kids were in trouble the FBI could help,” explains Nina Ginsberg, an Alexandria-based lawyer representing the parents of the suspects.

“We would hope that when families have concerns, law enforcement is the appropriate place to go. In this case it was not.”

By disclosing what they knew, the parents hoped the FBI would facilitate the return of their sons to the United States. Even if that meant that they would face American justice. Instead, they now believe the FBI passed on the suspects’ location to the Pakistani police.

“We understood that the Pakistanis were unable to locate them, and could not even confirm that they had arrived in Pakistan,” says Ms Ginsberg. “And within a very short period of time after… the FBI knew where they were, they had been arrested.”

‘Torture’

The FBI declined to comment on the case, or to respond to the specific claim that its agents passed on the suspects’ whereabouts to the Pakistani police.

A spokesman for the US Attorney’s Office for the eastern district of Virginia said prosecutors were still assessing whether a crime had been committed in the United States.

THE DEFENDANTS Umar Farooq, 24 Waqar Hussain Khan, 22 Ahmed Abdulah Minni, 20 Aman Hassan Yemer, 18 Ramy Zamzam, 22 All live within a few streets of each other in Alexandria, Virginia

The trial of the Americans commenced behind closed doors last month, and is due to resume in Sargodha on 17 April. If convicted, the defendants could face life in prison, even though the Pakistani police have publicly played down the level of threat they posed.

Following the arrests in December, a Pakistani police source told US network ABC News the young men “didn’t know the meaning of jihad”.

The police interrogation report claims that in the city of Hyderabad they were turned away from a madrassa linked to Jaish-e-Mohammed, a group classified as a terrorist organisation by the US State Department.

Back in Virginia, families of the accused insist any evidence against them must have been fabricated or obtained through torture. “I believe that,” explains Hassan, “because when you see the history of Pakistan on human rights issues, it’s the worst place in terms of treating the prisoners.”

A spokesman for the US State Department, Andy Laine, told the BBC: “We take seriously all reports of torture, and did raise these reports with the government of Pakistan,” adding that US consular officials had visited the suspects nine times in jail.

By e-mail, a Pakistani police source said the allegations had been investigated and found to be “baseless”.

But families of the accused feel betrayed by the US authorities, who they allege have placed a higher value on co-operation with Pakistan than on assessing the facts of this case. “My son has become a soccer ball between two teams,” complains Hassan. “He’s in a bad, bad situation right now.”

There remains one obvious question for the father of Aman Hassan Yemer, the alleged teenage militant. If not for jihadist purposes, why does he think his son travelled secretly and without warning to the other side of the world?

“He sent a message through the State Department saying he was sorry – that he’d just left suddenly, without thinking,” replies Hassan. “He just followed. And I don’t know how they came up with the idea of this kind of charge.”

Mullah Fazl ur Rahman – Taleban Mentor

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Intikhab Amir

Maulana Fazal-ur-Rahman is one of the few amongst the political leaders of Pakistan, who, in addition to the countrywide large public support, wields quite an influence across the borders. The Taliban movement inside Afghanistan, which is considered to be the creation of the madressahs run by Maulana Fazal-ur-Rahman’s faction of the Jamiat-i-Ulema-i-Islam (JUI), has restored his political importance within Pakistan.

The amount of influence wielded by the JUI on the Taliban due to its capacity to raise battalions of fighters has given a new dimension to his politics. The Taliban phenomenon, overwhelmingly accepted in areas already influenced by religious thoughts, specially the southern districts of the NWFP, the majority areas of FATA and pockets in Balochistan, has given a boost to the popularity graph of the JUI in these regions.

The hundreds of Madressahs run by the Maulana’s religio-political JUI in all the four provinces of the country and in FATA provide him and his party the fuel for electioneering politics.

The JUI’s hard core supporters in the rural areas of the NWFP and some of the Pakhtoon dominated areas of Balochistan besides the party’s ability to utilize the strength of its Madressahs in elections politics give the JUI an eminence over all the other religio-political parties of the country.

Capitalizing on the political line of action that he inherited from his father, Maulana Mufti Mahmood, Fazalur Rahman’s anti-secular politics and opposition to successive military governments equally played an important role in maintaining his public standing at a certain level.

He set up his own faction of JUI after parting ways with the undivided JUI, led by Maulana Darkhawsti, over the issue of extending support to the military regime of General Ziaul Haq. Although the JUI had been a part of the PNA in bringing about the overthrow of Bhutto, it later decided to go against the military regime and actively participated in the Movement for Restoration of Democracy (MRD).

JUI’s stand against the sitting military government is in continuation of the party’s line of action, which it adopted against the Zia regime. His father, Maulana Mufti Mahmood, who was a graduate from the Darul Uloom, Deoband, set the basis for Fazalur Rahman’s political expediency.

Being from a renowned religious family of the Abdulkhel Banyala area, in Dera Ismail Khan district, Maulana Fazalur Rahman inherited from his father mass public support from their native area.

Of all the four general elections that Fazalur Rahman contested since 1988 from his native D.I.Khan’s national assembly constituency, NA-18, he won two with convincing margins.

And the two he lost – in 1990 and 1997 – were, as his supporters put it, more because of the engineered results that entrusted heavy mandates to the Sharifs of Lahore on both the occasions.

It was because of the family’s mass public support and large vote bank in the D.I.Khan constituency that Maulana Mufti Mahmood was the lone leader in Pakistan who had defeated the then invincible Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto in the 1970 general elections.

Later, ZAB dismissed the Maulana Mufti Mahmood led-JUI/NAP coalition government in the NWFP (apart from the coalition government of the two parties in Balochistan) after developing political differences with them.

Maulana Fazlur Rahman’s politics, like his father’s, has been at odds with the Muslim League. The father was in Jama’at Ulema-i-Hind (Madani group) which shared the views of the Congress on the partition issue.

Fazalur Rahman remained in the camp of the political alliances and parties that were opposed to Nawaz Sharif’s League. Only once did he contest the election in alliance with the PML, in 1990, and then too he lost.

However, unlike his father Maulana Mufti Mahmood who earned fame by defeating ZAB in 1970, Fazalur Rahman built his public image by supporting ZAB’s daughter Benazir Bhutto during her second stint as the prime minister. His cooperation with the PPP to some extent diminished temporarily his party’s image of an anti-secular religio-political entity. His involvement in some financial scandals, specially the charges levelled against him of supplying permits for exporting diesel from Pakistan to Afghanistan, also threw a blot on the party’s reputation.

https://mmabbasi.wordpress.com/2010/02/21/mullah-fazl-ur-rahman-taleban-mentor/