Trail of an 'Enemy Combatant': From Desert to U.S. Heartland

Marri studied beginning computer science for a semester at tiny Spoon River College in Macomb, Ill. The farm town, which would figure in Marri's later travels, attracted a community of Middle Eastern students because of the intensive English program offered by another school there, Western Illinois University.

Eventually the brothers transferred to Bradley, a respected private university where student life revolves around fraternities and basketball. Ali al-Marri, whom acquaintances remember as a skinny, long-haired partygoer with a sense of humor, graduated in 1991 with a business degree. He returned home and later told the FBI that he worked a few years at the Qatar Islamic Bank in Doha and at the government audit bureau.

The country the brothers returned to was not the one they had left. Qatar was modernizing rapidly. The emir's son, Sheik Hamad Bin Khalifa al-Thani, was pushing development of the country's vast energy reserves. In 1995, while the father was out of the country, the son staged a coup.

Many in the extended Marri tribe were loyal to the old emir, and in early 1996 dozens of them were publicly implicated in a failed attempt to overthrow the son and return the father to power.

In the midst of that family turmoil, Ali al-Marri left again, this time for Afghanistan, according to family acquaintances and U.S. officials. No longer the carefree college student of his Bradley days, he headed to training camps set up by bin Laden, according to a court filing by the Pentagon's top counterterrorism official.

Marri followed a track parallel to that of the man who would become the mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and who, federal agents allege, became Marri's al-Qaeda handler: Khalid Sheik Mohammed. Like Marri, Mohammed attended college in the United States during the 1980s, in his case in rural North Carolina, and ended up in Qatar.

By the mid-1990s, Mohammed had taken part in a host of terrorist plots, including helping his nephew, Ramzi Yousef, finance the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Mohammed and a group of militants found refuge on the outskirts of Doha, on a farm owned by the religion minister, according to the Sept. 11 commission. In 1996, as the FBI was closing in, Mohammed slipped out of the country for Afghanistan.

U.S. intelligence officials believe that Marri trained for two years in Afghanistan, among other things receiving instruction in the use of poisons and toxins at the Derunta camp near Jalalabad, sources said. He is believed to have trained under Abu Khabab al-Masri, an Egyptian specialist in chemical and biological weapons who was killed in an airstrike in Pakistan last year.

When Marri returned to Doha, according to people who knew his family there, his long beard and radical beliefs stood out. His brothers told acquaintances that he was a jihadi who had trained in bin Laden's camps. One of those acquaintances, a former Qatari government official, told The Washington Post that Marri came home with CDs of al-Qaeda training lectures and propaganda, as well as a phony California driver's license.

Peter Theros, who was U.S. ambassador to Qatar in the 1990s, said that while the religious ideology there is nominally akin to that in Saudi Arabia, Qatar is "far more tolerant and democratic" than its neighbor. "Ali al-Marri is different. Even deeply religious Qataris are not like that," Theros said.

Not long after Marri's return to Qatar, the continuing investigation of the 1996 coup attempt cost some of his relatives their citizenship and their government jobs. By 2000, Marri's brothers and parents had returned to the Saudi desert. Marri's young wife and children moved there, too.

At the Time Out Motel

Marri did not follow his family back to the camel farm. Instead, in May 2000, he flew to Chicago from Dammam, Saudi Arabia, using a fake passport and the name Abdullakareem A. Almuslam, according to the FBI.