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

He spent some of the next two months in Chicago. In July, he surfaced in Macomb, the farm town where he had studied nearly 15 years earlier. He checked into the seedy, $22-a-night Time Out Motel, next to the raucous Dog Pound bar, popular with students. He stayed about a month, U.S. officials say.

While there, Marri registered a sham business he called AAA Carpet and opened three bank accounts with a stolen Social Security number, the government alleges. He is accused of then using stolen credit card numbers to make fictitious purchases from the carpet business and setting up an Internet account that could move money.

Then "Almuslam" made the trip that has most concerned and puzzled counterterrorism officials.

On Aug. 17, 2000, he called a travel agent to book a flight to New York, the FBI says. He also called the imam of the Macomb mosque, a Saudi graduate student named Khalid al-Jaloud, and asked for a ride to the Peoria airport, Jaloud recalled in an interview with The Post. Jaloud said he did not know the man who called himself Almuslam and did not ask where he was going. He said he often got calls from Arab students asking for aid.

Airline records show that on Aug. 18, 2000, "Almuslam" flew from Peoria to New York.

What he was doing in the city that day is not known. But the coincidences are suggestive. Dhiren Barot, al-Qaeda's chief operative in Britain, was already in New York. He had flown in from London a day earlier to case the stock exchange and other financial targets, according to a 2005 indictment in U.S. District Court in New York.

In his comments on Marri in May, Bush alleged for the first time that the stock exchange was one of his intended targets.

Barot, who was arrested in Britain in 2004 and sentenced to life in prison last fall, confessed to what the judge in the case called a plot of "colossal and unprecedented scale" to blow up London subway cars, detonate radioactive "dirty bombs" and use limousines packed with gas cylinders to destroy luxury hotels.

He and his accomplices also admitted conducting elaborate videotaped reconnaissance on the stock exchange, the World Bank and other financial centers in New York and Washington in 2000 and 2001, obtaining building plans and security procedures. The discovery of those plans and videos in a 2004 raid on an al-Qaeda house in Pakistan prompted U.S. officials to raise the terrorism threat level and led to Barot's arrest.

After "Almuslam's" trip to New York, he flew back to Chicago and days later returned to Saudi Arabia. And he left something behind.

"He asked me to put a computer in my house," Jaloud said. "I did not want to. He said he wanted to store stuff until he could bring his family back."

Jaloud said he reluctantly agreed to keep the computer in the basement of the mosque. "A few weeks or a month or two later he started calling, wanting me to send it to Pakistan. He told me he is there," Jaloud said, adding that the request worried him. "He called two or three times and argued."