LITTLE ROCK — In his fifth letter to the court, filed Monday, confessed soldier killer Abdulhakim Muhammad claims to have gunned down a man in Nashville, Tenn., several years ago, but provides almost no details of the purported slaying.
The 25-year-old Muhammad’s motivation for making the claim is not clear, and the seven-sentence letter, dated April 2, is vague about who was killed, exactly when the shooting occurred and where it happened. In the letter, Muhammad repeats a claim that he’s affiliated with al-Qaida, and asks that the letter be forwarded to the appropriate authorities in Tennessee. A spokesman for Nashville police said investigators were unaware of Muhammad’s claims or what slaying he might be describing. Nashville had 81 homicides in 2006, the year Muhammad claims the shooting took place.
Muhammad calls the purported Nashville shooting “my first jihad operation,” and refers to the victim as a Kaffir, an Arabicterm for unbeliever. Muhammad has similarly described as a “jihadi attack” the June 2009 shooting in Little Rock where he faces capital murder charges in which Army Pvt. William Long of Conway was killed and Pvt. Quinton Ezeagwula was wounded.
Muhammad has not been charged with any crimes outside of Arkansas. Facing the death penalty in Little Rock, Muhammad’s capital murder trial is scheduled for late July.
“This is a confession of my first jihad operation in East Nashville back in 2006,” the letter, handwritten in pencil, states. “The target was a Kaffir thief who robbed and terrorized elderly Muslims and Muslim women at gunpoint.The weapon was a AK-47 Chinese model I used to own. He got shot several times and didn’t survive. There’s a group of hypocrite informants in Nashville who have informed authorities of this operation beforehand and this letter is a confirmation. This was before I met al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula and before I traveled to Yemen. So send this to who it needs to be sent to in Tennessee.”
The letter is written on the bottom of a Dec. 29 printout of a Sept. 30, 2004, article from The New York Times about a judge in Yemen sentencing two men to death for the bombing of the USS Cole destroyer that killed 17 sailors.
Pulaski County Circuit Judge Herb Wright received the letter Friday, according to the court file, and it was postmarked April 6. The judge has mailed copies to prosecutors and the defense. Both chief deputy prosecutor John Johnson and defense attorney Claiborne Ferguson said Monday that they did not know about the letter and had not received a copy. Muhammad is due back in court Wednesday for his 15th court appearance, a hearing in part to discuss whether jurors will have to fill out a questionnaire as part of the selection process.
Muhammad, born Carlos Leon Bledsoe, attended college in Nashville where he converted to Islam at age 19. His father testified before a congressional committee last month that his son had been brainwashed by radical Islamists at Nashville mosques, an accusation Muslim leaders in that city denied, saying they don’t tolerate extremists. Muhammad moved to Yemen from Nashville in late 2007 and returned to the city in January 2009 after he was deported from the Arabian Peninsula country for being caught with forged travel papers. He moved to Little Rock in March 2009 to open a branch of his father’s tour-bus company.
He told authorities he bungled a fire-bomb attack on a Nashville rabbi’s home shortly before the June 2009 slaying at the Little Rock recruiting center on Rodney Parham Road. Muhammad was arrested within minutes of the shooting, with police finding a pistol, two rifles and more than 500 rounds of ammunition in his pickup. He has admitted to shooting the soldiers in interviews with police and the press. He wrote four earlier letters to the judge, one of them admitting to the shootings, offering to plead guilty to the charges and describing his motivation, claiming the shooting was justified by U.S. military policies that Muhammad believes targets fellow Muslims.
Prosecutors have scoffed at Muhammad’s claims of being a terrorist, saying the slaying was no more elaborate than a drive-by shooting. Muhammad didn’t publicly claim al-Qaida membership until he’d been jailed for about seven months, writing in his first letter to the court that he claimed allegiance to a former aide to Osama bin Laden who is reported to head Yemen-based al-Qaida-in-the-Arabian-Peninsula. The al-Qaida offshoot had came to national attention less than a month before Muhammad’s letter with the failed bombing attempt of a Detroit-bound plane on Christmas Day 2009.
Arkansas, Pages 7 on 04/12/2011