Immigration hunts for records of al Qaeda suspect
Stabroek News
March 26, 2003
Immigration authorities are checking to see if a Guyana passport had been issued to 27-year old Adnan El Shukrijumah who the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) claims has one in his possession.
According to an Associated Press report carried in the Trinidad Express Shukrijumah's father is Guyanese and is known in Guyana by relatives as Adnan Juman. It said that he travelled on a Guyanese passport because his father was born here. His father, 73-year old Gulshair, lives in Miramar, Florida and claims to have last spoken to his son five months ago who told him that he was teaching English in Morocco.
Both Police Commissioner Floyd McDonald and Guyana's Ambassador to the United States of America, Dr Odeen Ishmael told Stabroek News that their offices were checking to see if a passport has been issued.
Also this newspaper has ascertained that the police were asked by the US embassy to be on the lookout after the FBI issued an alert last week asking law enforcement agencies and the public to watch for the 27-year-old El Shukrijumah, saying he was suspected of being part of the al Qaeda terrorist network.
Dr Ishmael told Stabroek News that his office had been flooded with inquiries from Guyanese living in the US after media reports that Shukrijumah was suspected of links to al Qaeda and that a passport had been issued to him in Florida some time in 2000.
However, Dr Ishmael said that the Guyana Consulate in Florida would not have issued a passport without referring the application to his office. He said that the search was tedious, as the records were not computerised.
A Trinidad Express report yesterday, quoting a Trinidad and Tobago immigration official, said that Shukrijumah/Juman had arrived there on May 17, 2001 from Guyana for a six-day stay with a friend. It said too that the Trinidadian immigration authorities were yet to confirm when he left and where he was headed.
The AP report said that on his last visit to Guyana three years ago, the younger El Shukrijumah lost that passport, according to Bibi Juman, wife of the man's cousin, Marzab Juman. "As far as we know, he lost the passport somewhere between the airport when he came here around 2000 and the hotel at which he stayed," she said. He left Guyana on an emergency travel document, she said. It was the first time the Guyana family had seen him in at least 20 years, and he told them he was headed for Trinidad. The Juman family said they had recognised El Shukrijumah's picture on television but that they knew him as Adnan Juman. The FBI says El Shukrijumah has used many aliases.
The AP report said too that El Shukrijumah's family lived in Trinidad during the 1980s. It quoted Munaf Mohammed, an imam at a mosque in central Trinidad, as saying that Adnan's father had taught at several mosques in this country. Mohammed said Adnan El Shukrijumah was a young boy when he knew him, and he described the elder El Shukrijumah as "a very nice, peaceful, quiet man".
Mohammed said he has rarely spoken to the family since they left Trinidad for the United States in about 1990.
In Guyana one man told Stabroek News he had known the father and found him to be very peaceful.
The man, who did not wish disclose his name, told this newspaper yesterday that he knew El Shukrijumah many years ago, before he migrated to Saudi Arabia. The man indicated that they had once worshipped at the same mosque.
