FBI has imam on radar but no cause to act

By Scott Shane and Adam Goldman, New York Times News Service

Saturday, Oct. 1, 2016 | 1:30 a.m.

WASHINGTON — For more than a decade, Suleiman Anwar Bengharsa has served as a Muslim cleric in Maryland, working as a prison chaplain and as an imam at mosques in Annapolis and outside Baltimore. He gave a two-week course in 2011 on Islamic teachings on marriage at the Islamic Society of Baltimore, where President Barack Obama made a much-publicized visit this year.

But in the past two years, Bengharsa’s public pronouncements have taken a dark turn. On Facebook, he has openly endorsed the Islamic State, posted gruesome videos showing ISIS fighters beheading and burning alive their enemies and praised terrorist attacks overseas. The “Islamic Jurisprudence Center” website he set up last year has condemned U.S. mosques as un-Islamic and declared that homosexual acts should be punished by death.

That is not all. An affidavit filed in federal court by the FBI says that Bengharsa, 59, supplied $1,300 in June 2015 to a Detroit man who used it to expand his arsenal of firearms and grenades. The man, Sebastian Gregerson, 29, a Muslim convert who sometimes calls himself Abdurrahaman Bin Mikaayl, was arrested in late July and indicted on explosives charges.

Nearly a year ago, in fact, the FBI said in a court filing — accidentally and temporarily made public in an online database — that agents suspected the two men were plotting terrorism. “Based on the totality of the aforementioned information and evidence, there is reason to believe that Bengharsa and Gregerson are engaged in discussions and preparations for some violent act on behalf of” the Islamic State, an agent wrote.

Yet Bengharsa has not been arrested or charged. It appears officials do not have clear evidence that he has broken the law. His inflammatory statements are protected by the First Amendment, and agents appear to have no proof that he knew Gregerson planned to buy illegal explosives. In his checkbook, next to the notation for the $1,300 check, Bengharsa wrote “zakat,” or charity, the documents show.

The case poses in a striking way the dilemma for the FBI in deciding when constitutionally protected speech crosses into inciting violence or conspiring to commit a terrorist act.

The bureau was sharply criticized for not acting more aggressively on prior warnings about the men who carried out attacks in Orlando, Florida, in June and in New York and New Jersey in August. And in early August, the FBI arrested a transit police officer from Fairfax, Virginia, after watching him for six years before charging him with providing support to the Islamic State. It was another case that raised questions — even among agents — about why the FBI and federal prosecutors waited so long to act, potentially putting the public at risk.

In testimony before Congress this week, the FBI director, James Comey, said the challenge for FBI agents was determining when someone has crossed the line from speech to criminal activity. “It’s even protected speech to say I’m a fan of the Islamic State so-called,” Comey said.

When the suspect is a cleric, like Bengharsa, the matter is especially delicate.

“It’s very possible that he’s never crossed the legal threshold,” said Seamus Hughes, deputy director of the Program on Extremism at George Washington University, who has closely followed the imam’s story. But Hughes called the situation “perplexing and concerning.” The imam “can take his supporters right up to the line. It’s like a making a cake and not putting in the final ingredient. It’s winks and nods all the way.”

Bengharsa appears to have plenty of money. Court records say he received $902,710 in wire transfers in 2014 and 2015, possibly an inheritance. He told The Detroit News that he often helped needy people like Gregerson. “If that individual turns around and wants to use that money for something else that’s illegal, the person who gave the money cannot be held responsible,” Bengharsa said. “It’s pathetic if they are making those connections. If that’s what this country has become, I’d rather be in jail.”

The documents say he transferred money three times to an unnamed person in Yemen.

Investigators are also exploring contacts between Bengharsa and other people suspected of extremism or terrorism. One is Yusuf Wehelie, 25, a Virginia man arrested in July and charged with weapons possession, which would be illegal because he has a previous felony conviction for burglary.

Wehelie first came to public attention in 2010, when he and his brother, Yahya Wehelie, both U.S. citizens, were temporarily detained in Cairo and prevented by the FBI from flying home. U.S. officials said such delays were sometimes necessary to assess whether a person posed a security threat. The American Civil Liberties Union and the Council on American-Islamic Relations protested that the rights of such travelers were being violated.

At Yusuf Wehelie’s detention hearing in July, officials said he had told undercover agents that he supported the Islamic State and that if he couldn’t join it overseas, he would attack a military recruiting center, possibly using explosives. (Wehelie’s lawyer, Nina Ginsberg, said that in later recorded conversations, he disavowed those statements and later stopped replying to the undercover agents.)

In Baltimore, another young man named Maalik Alim Jones was arrested late last year and charged with joining a terrorist group in Africa. Bengharsa had preached on occasion at a Baltimore mosque Jones attended, but it is not clear that they knew each other.

The FBI has been closely watching the imam for months, law enforcement officials say. A spokesman for the bureau declined to comment.

The authorities are concerned that Bengharsa, who claims an impressive list of scholarly credentials, may be spreading the Islamic State message that violence can be justified against perceived enemies of the faith. In view of the payment to Gregerson, they also fear he may be financing other supporters of the Islamic State. The FBI has said in court that he is under investigation for conspiring and providing material support to the Islamic State.

Bengharsa did not reply to emails, phone messages or a note left at his town house in Clarksburg, Maryland, a town equidistant from Baltimore and Washington.

In comments to The Detroit News, which first reported the link between Gregerson and Bengharsa in September, the imam said the government was engaging in “McCarthyism” and that the accusations were “ridiculous.”

He denied that he supported the Islamic State but said: “It might appear that way. I am an advocate of the United States and the West getting the hell out of the Middle East and the Muslim world.”

He added a question: “If this was the case, why haven’t they come to arrest me?”

Bengharsa, who was born in Libya, moved to the United States at age 10, according to a biography he posted online. He claims to have received a degree from Al Azhar University in Cairo, and additional degrees in economics and Islamic studies.

He lived in Texas and later, after embracing religion, worked as a chaplain in Maryland prisons from 2006-09, as an imam at the Islamic Society of Annapolis from 2009-10 and at Masjid Umar, a small storefront mosque outside Baltimore, from 2011-14. Last year, he created the Islamic Jurisprudence Center, whose street address turns out to be a mailbox at the UPS Store near his home in Clarksburg. The authorities said he also frequently visited another mosque, Dar al-Taqwa, in the Baltimore suburb of Ellicott City.

Bengharsa appears to have long held very conservative views. In his 2011 lectures at the Islamic Society of Baltimore, for example, he said Muslims must strictly follow the Shariah, or Islamic law, no matter where they live.

“It doesn’t help if you say ‘I’m now living in America’ or ‘I’m now living in England,’ or ‘My culture says such and such.'” he said.

But Bengharsa’s harsh recent pronouncements set him much farther from mainstream American Islam. On the Islamic Jurisprudence Center site in April, he condemned by name the leading Muslim organizations in the United States, 12 prominent clerics he called “evil scholars/imams,” and a list of 22 mosques — including the two where he previously worked. Since the court documents naming him were made public, he removed those pages from his site, though they remain available in the Google cache.

In his standoff with the FBI, Bengharsi appears to have scant support in the American Muslim community. Muhammad Jameel, the president of the Islamic Society of Baltimore, said that the imam’s marriage lectures five years ago were his only connection to the mosque and that his recent statements were “against all the tenets of Islam.”

“He’s a nut,” Jameel said. “He has freedom of speech. But if he’s a criminal, I want to see him in jail.”