Clement Rodney Hampton-El

Clement Rodney Hampton-El, an American Black Muslim, suffered arm and leg wounds in Afghanistan. He fought as a mujahideen under Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, now an enemy of the United States.

After returning to Brooklyn, Hampton-El worked closely with a shadowy splinter group called al-Fuqra, whose followers in the United States and Canada are predominantly Black Muslims. Several other al-Fuqra initiates had also trained in Pakistan as part of the effort to throw the Soviets out of Afghanistan.

Founded in 1980 by a Pakistani mystic named Shiek Mubarik Ali Jilani, al-Fuqra was organized into independent terrorist cells. An avowed enemy of the Nation of Islam, al-Fuqra has been linked by U.S. officials to 17 homicides and 13 firebombings in the United States. Its targets were usually other minorities or rival Muslim leaders.

In 1995, Hampton-El was sentenced to 35 years in prison for his involvement in a failed plot to bomb the United Nations and other New York City landmarks.

Nine other Muslim extremists were convicted as co-conspirators in this case, including Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, a blind Egyptian cleric, who is serving a life sentence for his role as ringleader of the plot. The blind sheik has also been linked to the terrorists who bombed the World Trade Center in 1993, killing six people and injuring more than 1,000.

Hampton-El told an FBI informant that he had participated in a test explosion for the first attack on the World Trade Center.

According to recent reports, the Justice Department is probing possible links between al-Fuqra and Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda network.

American officials have obtained a videotape of a December 1993 meeting in Sudan, then a nerve center for the bin Laden organization, where al-Fuqra leader Shiek Mubarik Ali Jilani met with members of Islamic Jihad, Hamas and other Islamic terrorist groups.

Representatives of al-Qaeda are also believed to have been present at this meeting. Federal officials also believe that al-Fuqra members collaborated with Wadih El-Hage, who was sentenced to life in prison this year for conspiring with Osama bin Laden in the bombings of two American embassies in Africa in 1998.

(emphasis added)

Source: Southern Poverty Law Center , “Strange Bedfellows”, Intelligence Report, Spring 2002.

More background on Hampton-El here.

Oh, and here's something else - Hampton-El apparently testified that he received money from the Saudi embassy in Washington to recruit converted U.S. soldiers for jihad operations in Bosnia. Read this.