Mumtaz Ahmad spent more than three years at a madrassa in Pakistan learning the Quran, then pursued his desire to become a Qari at a similar Islamic religious school in Kabul. Now, Ahmad languishes in an Afghan intelligence service jail after police caught him three weeks ago planting a roadside bomb on the Shomali Plain near Bagram in an act he says was driven by a belief that killing foreign troops was his Islamic duty. It was his third attempted bomb attack this year HELP WANTED: Suicide Boomer |
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"Abdul Rahman" seems to be the Pashtun equivalent of "John Smith." Maybe the Islamic equivalent.
The young man’s account could not be independently confirmed but it was broadly similar in its religious aspects to the published stories of other suspected bombers interviewed in detention in Afghanistan. Though Ahmad was caught, one of the investigators said, police believe “Abdul Rahman” had been lurking in the area ready to detonate the bomb by remote control but got away.
Not only a suicide boom, but a surprise suicide boom...
“We haven’t had as much success as we need. We’ve had cases where we’ve made an arrest but the rest of the cell broke up and its members disappeared,” the investigator said. Ahmad said he had left Afghanistan while the Taliban were in power to study for three-and-a-half years at a madrassa in Peshawar, across the border in Pakistan. He returned home soon after Taliban rule collapsed in November 2001 and began attending the Kabul madrasa, where he was one of up to 200 students. He said “Abdul Rahman” had used religion to talk him into working as a courier and had given him the 3.5 kg of explosives that he had buried in a vineyard until the man telephoned him and told where to drop it. “I really regret what has happened, what I did.
"What do you regret most?"
"Getting caught."
"I realise now that these foreign forces came here to help us, not disgrace us,” he said. “It’s too late now. I know I was deceived.” He has not been charged and says he does not know how long he may spend in prison.
How about as long as anybody he would have killed would be dead?
Izzis the Islamic version of a jailhouse conversion?
AhmadÂ’s family insist they had no idea what he was up to.
"He's really pretty dumb, y'know."
“All we knew is that he was a Qari,” said his uncle Sayed Agha, adding, “He spent all his time praying in the madrasa.”
"That's how he came to be unhinged, ain't it, Aunt Sookie?"
"That's right, Uncle Sayed. All that head bonking just isn't good for an impressionable boy."
The police still had not told the family he had been arrested or why and the family had not asked, the old man added.
"We don't wanna know."
“We were watching television and all of a sudden we saw him and heard he had been arrested,” Sayed Agha said, adding, “His father was shocked when he saw him.”