LONDON -- When, in 1992, a London pickpocket and mugger named Richard Reid found himself in jail for the first time, he proved to be a major-league hell-raiser. His record depicts an angry, combative inmate who got into so many fights he had to be transferred twice. When the same man walked out of prison in 1996, he seemed completely changed. He had a new name -- he called himself Abdel Rahim -- and a strong but quiet devotion to a new faith, Islam.
He took a minimum-wage factory job in Brixton, the South London area that generations of immigrants have made home, and spent most Fridays at the Brixton Mosque, learning the religion and practicing his beginner's Arabic, friends recall.
Reid's Muslim connections would gradually pull him back into crime, U.S. prosecutors say. Reid fell in with Muslim terrorists in London and was lured into Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network, according to a 16-count U.S. indictment handed up in January.
In short order, he was traveling through Europe, the Middle East and Central Asia, allegedly on al Qaeda missions. On Dec. 22, he boarded an American Airlines flight from Paris to Miami with sophisticated bombs concealed in his shoes, investigators say. Passengers and flight crew jumped him as he allegedly tried to detonate the bombs, and the plane was diverted to Boston, where he is being held pending trial.
As depicted by prosecutors, Reid is a dramatic example of a problem that frightens European governments: a network of young men secretly recruited by bin Laden's terrorist organization, many of them ready to give their lives for the cause on instructions from mysterious distant handlers.
In the days and weeks after Sept. 11, police picked up several dozen suspects across Europe -- in London, Birmingham and Leicester in England; and in Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam, Madrid, Berlin and Hamburg -- charging some with crimes that range from the attacks on the World Trade Center to activities in Afghanistan. But they didn't get Reid, and they worry that many more like him are at large.
Most of the men detained were born in Muslim countries or in Britain's large communities of immigrants from the Middle East and South Asia, which have made Islam the fastest-growing religion in Europe. Reid was an anomaly, born into a Jamaican English family and converted to Islam in London's fundamentalist world -- the milieu sometimes called "Londonistan." He appears to have traveled more than al Qaeda members usually do, his British accent and passport helping to ease him past border inspections.
Three months after Reid's arrest in Boston, investigators are still trying to track those movements and identify his contacts. It can be dangerous work. Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl was kidnapped and killed in Pakistan while looking into alleged links between Reid and a Muslim cleric in that country.
What follows is a reconstruction of the main events of Reid's life and his work as an alleged al Qaeda operative as known so far, assembled from interviews with acquaintances in London, investigators, court documents, local media and government statements.
Reid was born in London in 1973, to a white British mother and a mixed-race Jamaican father. Robin Reid was in prison when his son was born, and was never more than a distant figure in the boy's life. To the extent there was any religion in young Richard's life, it was Protestantism.
Reid attended Thomas Tallis Comprehensive, a reasonably well-regarded secondary school in South London. But classmates, who express concern about giving their names, say he never showed much interest in academics. He dropped out of school soon after his 16th birthday.
Police records show that Reid moved into a life of petty crime -- muggings, robberies, shoplifting. He spent some evenings armed with a can of spray paint, leaving his graffiti "tag" -- Enrol -- on walls and railings all over the neighborhood. From 1992 to 1996, he was in and out of jail, moving on from youth correctional facilities to the tough Brixton Prison.
Occasionally during those years he saw his father, and Robin Reid has said it was he who urged Richard to start talking to the Muslim chaplain at Brixton Prison. The younger Reid reportedly developed a strong interest in Islam. As soon as he was released, he knocked on the door of the Brixton Mosque.
"He was eager to know Islam, to learn Arabic, to be an active member of this community," said Abdul Haqq Baker, the imam who took Reid in at the mosque and found him a job at an incense factory.
Another worshiper at the mosque between 1996 and 1997 was Zacarias Moussaoui, a Frenchman who was studying in London. Moussaoui is being held in the United States on conspiracy charges related to the Sept. 11 attacks. Baker said he doesn't know whether Reid and Moussaoui were friends at the time.
Many of those who worshiped at the Brixton Mosque -- a Victorian row house converted to religious use -- liked to visit some of the more fundamentalist mosques in the city. Both Reid and Moussaoui were known to attend services in North London at the Finsbury Park Mosque. That's where the education of Richard Reid, suspected terrorist, evidently began, investigators say.
Leading that mosque is Abu Hamza, a fiery anti-American, anti-Israel preacher. Hamza has sight in only one eye, and metal hooks instead of hands. These wounds, he has said, came from land mine explosions during the opposition to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979.
The Finsbury Park Mosque serves a nearby population of North African immigrants, but as Hamza's reputation has grown, the mosque has drawn worshipers from all over London. At a recent Friday afternoon service, Hamza told his flock that the Sept. 11 attacks were organized by U.S. spy agencies as "a dirty plot against mankind in general and Muslims in particular." The only people to benefit from the attacks, he said, were the U.S. military and Zionists.
After several visits to Finsbury Park, Reid became an outspoken proponent of jihad, or holy war. "He had the extremist line down perfectly," recalled Baker of the Brixton Mosque. "That is, 'The U.S. and Israel are the enemy, and good Muslims must take up the battle against the enemy.' "
Sometime in 1999, Reid's new friends at Hamza's mosque arranged for him to attend training classes in Pakistan, authorities contend. Reid's father, who sold his story to a London tabloid, said he thought the travel was part of his son's education in the ways of Islam. U.S. authorities say he was actually being trained by al Qaeda, and probably went to one of the group's camps in Afghanistan.
How long he remained there is unclear, but by last July he was back in London. That month he traveled to Amsterdam. He applied for a new passport at the British Embassy there, declaring that he had accidentally put his previous passport through a washing machine, a British government spokesman said. He was quickly given a new one, without any of the suspicious entry visas that had been stamped in his old one.
On July 7, he was at Amsterdam's airport. There, according to the Israeli airline El Al, he boarded an El Al plane bound for Tel Aviv. The airline's security staff found him sufficiently suspicious to give him a thorough going-over, including a check of his shoes. He was allowed to board the flight, but an Israeli source told the Associated Press that he was assigned a seat in the rear of the plane, with an armed sky marshal sitting next to him.
Reid was questioned on arrival at Ben Gurion airport, but was allowed to enter Israel as a tourist.
Israeli officials are trying to piece together Reid's movements in Israel, worried that he might have made contact with the Islamic Resistance Movement or other radical Palestinian groups. What is known is that after about five days, Reid crossed the border into Egypt, then flew to Turkey and back to Pakistan.
Under the aegis of al Qaeda, Reid may have taken a second Arabic name, "Abdul Ra'uff." When a Wall Street Journal reporter acquired a desktop computer that had been used at an al Qaeda office in Kabul, there were extensive records from a man with that name of reconnaissance trips around Europe and the Middle East. The time and destination of these trips coincide almost perfectly with information authorities have about Reid's travels.
Using a British passport, "Ra'uff" went to Israel and Egypt last year. He reportedly sent back reports on the best spots to place bombs so they would do the most damage.
Reid returned to Amsterdam around Aug. 9, and may have stayed there for several weeks. Investigators believe he purchased the sneakers there that would later be packed with explosives.
It is unclear where Reid was on Sept. 11. But just days after the attacks, Dutch and Belgian police staged simultaneous raids on two safe houses in Rotterdam and outside Brussels, where they discovered fake passports, machines for making fake credit cards, weapons and explosive materials.
One of those arrested in Rotterdam was identified as Jerome Courtailler, who may have been one of Reid's contacts in Europe, officials said.
But no one noticed Reid, and sometime between Dec. 5 and Dec. 7, he went to Brussels, where he stayed at the Dar es Salaam Hotel in a gritty immigrant neighborhood and spent much of his time sending e-mail messages, officials say. "Richard Reid was here for 10 days and visited cybercafes, that we know," said a spokesman for the public prosecutor's office in Brussels.
Late December found Reid in Paris. He was spotted in the neighborhood around the Gare du Nord train station, but investigators are still trying to figure out where he stayed. He probably stayed in a safe house, they say, since there is no sign of him in hotel records.
It is known, however, that he came to Happy Call -- a cafe with a bank of computers in a working-class immigrant district in the north of Paris, on a narrow street crammed between Indian and Senegalese restaurants, hair-weaving shops and stores selling African artifacts.
In an interview, the manager, a Sri Lankan who gave his name only as Ravi, said he barely remembers most customers who pass through, either to make long-distance calls from the telephone booths or to send e-mail messages home. But he said he did remember a man who spent most of the day at Happy Call on Dec. 20.
"He was big," Ravi recalled, identifying the man as Reid, who is 6 foot 4. "And a little bit dirty." Reid stayed on the computer for about an hour in the morning, and returned for another four-hour e-mailing session in the evening. Investigators say he was exchanging e-mail with someone in Peshawar, Pakistan, close to the border with Afghanistan. At midnight he was told he had to leave because the shop was closing.
The next day, Reid tried to board an American Airlines flight from Paris to Miami. His unkempt appearance -- as well as the fact that he had no bags -- raised enough concern among authorities who decided to subject Reid to intensive questioning, forcing him to miss his flight. Security officials eventually concluded it was safe to let him fly, and he was put up at an airport hotel overnight.
French officials say that while at the hotel, Reid used another e-mail service to contact Pakistan and received instructions to continue with his mission. In one of those exchanges, leaked to the French media by investigators, Reid seemed unsure what to do after missing his flight. The reports say the handler in Pakistan messaged back that Reid should try again.
The next day, he returned to the airport and was allowed to board. The same security officials recognized him, and this time they let him right through.
Once on board, according to a U.S. indictment, Reid tried to light a fuse attached to one of his shoes, which were packed with enough explosives to blow a hole in the Boeing 767. Passengers and crew jumped him and held him down until the plane made the emergency landing in Boston, where he was arrested.
An international investigation quickly began. But so far, Richard Reid's story has as many holes in it as those of the Sept. 11 hijackers.
