DETROIT: A leader of a radical US Sunni Islam group killed in a shootout with federal agents near Detroit repeatedly told followers that the government was the enemy and they must be willing to take on the FBI — even if it meant death, authorities said.

“You cannot have a non-violent revolution,” Luqman Ameen Abdullah said, according to a 2008 conversation secretly recorded by a confidential FBI source.

Abdullah, 53, was killed on Wednesday at a warehouse in Dearborn, where agents were attempting to arrest him on charges that included conspiracy to sell stolen goods and illegal possession and sale of firearms. He was one of 11 people named in a criminal complaint after a two-year investigation. FBI spokeswoman Sandra Berchtold said Abdullah refused to surrender, fired a weapon and was killed by gunfire from agents.

The 43-page complaint described Abdullah as an extremist who believed the FBI bombed New York’s World Trade Center in 1993 and the Oklahoma City federal building two years later. Neither Abdullah nor his co-defendants were charged with terrorism. But he was “advocating and encouraging his followers to commit violent acts against the United States”, FBI agent Gary Leone wrote in an affidavit filed with the complaint.

As british couple slept, Somali pirates hijacked yacht

MOGADISHU: A British man kidnapped by Somali pirates while vacationing on a yacht with his wife said in an interview released on Thursday that the sea bandits had crept aboard with guns while he was asleep and demanded money.

... contd.