Imam From Va. Mosque Now Thought to Have Aided Al-Qaeda

In January 2001, he enrolled in a PhD program at George Washington University and was hired at Dar al-Hijrah, which regularly draws about 3,000 people to Friday prayers.

In April 2001, Hazmi left San Diego and showed up at Aulaqi's new mosque, along with another future hijacker, Hani Hanjour. They were quickly aided in securing an apartment by a Jordanian man they met there -- Eyad al-Rababah.

"Some [FBI] agents suspect that Aulaqi may have tasked Rababah to help Hazmi and Hanjour. We share that suspicion, given the remarkable coincidence of Aulaqi's prior relationship with Hazmi," the 9/11 Commission concluded. Further, the phone number for Dar al-Hijrah had been found in the Hamburg apartment of one of the planners of the attacks, Ramzi Binalshibh.

The FBI told the 9/11 Commission and Congress that it did not have reason to detain Aulaqi.

Former Senate Intelligence Committee chairman Bob Graham, who led the congressional panel on Sept. 11, accused the FBI of bungling investigations of Aulaqi before and after 9/11. "Some believe that Aulaqi was the first person since the summit meeting in Malaysia with whom al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi shared their terrorist intentions and plans," Graham wrote in his 2004 book "Intelligence Matters."

After 9/11, Aulaqi publicly condemned the attacks. But in comments published in English on Sept. 17, 2001, on IslamOnline, Aulaqi suggested that Israelis may have been responsible for the 9/11 attacks and that the FBI "went into the roster of the airplanes and whoever has a Muslim or Arab name became the hijacker by default."

Weeks after leaving the United States in the spring of 2002, he posted an essay in Arabic titled "Why Muslims Love Death" on the Islam Today Web site, lauding the fervor of Palestinian suicide bombers. Months later he praised them in English at a lecture in a London mosque that was recorded on videotape.

Aulaqi briefly returned to the United States in fall 2002, visiting the Fairfax home of Timimi, spiritual leader of an Islamic center a few miles from Dar al-Hijrah, according to court records.

"Aulaqi attempted to get al Timimi to discuss issues related to the recruitment of young Muslims," according to a court filing by Timimi's attorney, Edward MacMahon, who asserted that those "entreaties were rejected."

Timimi was sentenced in 2005 to life in prison for inciting young Muslims to go to Afghanistan after 9/11 and to wage war against the United States. Eleven of his followers were convicted of charges including weapons violations and aiding a terrorist organization. Some had simulated armed conflict by playing paintball in the Virginia countryside, and some went on to camps in Pakistan run by the group Lashkar-i-Taiba, which trained foreign and local fighters for Muslim militant groups including the Taliban.

Court records show that Aulaqi had been driven to the meeting by one of Timimi's followers, who later testified as a government witness. Another convicted member of the group had Aulaqi's phone number on his cellphone, according to court testimony.

Dar al-Hijrah's spokesman and others in leadership positions at the mosque did not respond to requests for interviews for this article.