Amina Farah Ali and Hawo Mohamed Hassan of Rochester, indicted last week, weren’t collecting cash for poverty-stricken grandparents, but for the violent terrorist organization Al-Shabab, officials say.
They were a regular sight among the dimly lit stalls of the Somali shopping malls and the narrow hallways of the high-rise apartment towers in the Cedar-Riverside neighborhood known as Little Mogadishu.

Two conservatively dressed women — one older, one younger — often carrying pictures of destitute grandfathers or desperate children to make their pleas more poignant.

Few questioned their work. After all, charity is an obligation, a virtue among the Muslim faithful. Even the poorest of those solicited found a way to spare a few dollars.

But it was all a ruse, the FBI said late last week as the two were indicted in a vast anti-terrorism investigation, the largest since the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. The women, Amina Farah Ali and Hawo Mohamed Hassan of Rochester, collected cash not for poverty-stricken grandparents, but for the violent terrorist organization Al-Shabab, the FBI says. Al-Shabab, which is tied to Al-Qaida, has trained foreign fighters and carried out suicide bombings.

How did the two women manage to conceal what the FBI said was their true intent as they sought donations in the Minnesota Somali community, the largest outside of Somalia?

Women collecting for charity, area Somalis say, would have provided the perfect cover.

In a culture where females are the most devoted keepers of causes and the most trusted couriers of cash, local Somalis say women collecting for charities is common. These women in particular — pious, hard-working, bold — would not have been doubted, said Abdifatah Abdinur, a Rochester community leader.

“Women are the backbone of the Somali community; they do these things,” Abdinur said. “But this is the first time anyone has heard of them doing something wrong.”

Aden Mabruk remembers what it was like to sit, silent and mystified, in a South Carolina middle school classroom half a world away from the dusty African refugee camp that had been his home for most of his life.

It was February 2005. The youngster, a member of the persecuted Somali Bantu people, could claim no written language and wasn’t exactly sure of his age — perhaps 12, although a U.S. Customs official decided he looked more like 14 when he arrived with his mother and three younger siblings.

“In our culture, we don’t know exactly our birthday,” Aden said.

As rapid-fire English swirled around him at Richland 2’s Dent Middle School, the newly minted eighth-grader decided to simply sit in silence, listening to his teachers and hoping to avoid any conflict with students.

“It was really tough,” he said.

Now, five years later, a smiling Mabruk can claim a high school diploma — awarded this morning at Richland Northeast High School’s commencement — as well as a deeper understanding of the English language and a future that he hopes will include college.

He is the first of Columbia’s Somali Bantu students to graduate from high school, fulfilling the dreams of his late father, who hoped his eldest son would come to the United States “and do something good.”

“My father, he always had a big dream to come to the United States,” Aden recalled, but the elder Mabruk died of tuberculosis in the Kenyan refugee camp before the family came to America.

“I have no photograph of my father, but I see him in my mind,” he said. “He would be really happy.”

A journey of miles and years

It has been a long and perilous journey for the Mabruk family, one of about 25 Somali Bantu refugee families who came to South Carolina as part of one of the largest U.S. government refugee resettlement programs in history.

More than 12,000 Somali Bantus were flown to the United States after many years of languishing in Kenyan refugee camps.

The Somali Bantu, descendants of African tribes originally living in what are now Tanzania, Mozambique and Malawi in East Africa, suffered persecution and enslavement in Somalia and other parts of the continent for two centuries.

In the 1990s, as Somalia plunged into civil war, the Bantu, mainly living as farmers in southern Somalia, were again targets of warring factions. Their farms, animals and crops were stolen, women raped and men killed.

There was an initial storm of controversy over the Bantus’ settlement in South Carolina when the city of Cayce rejected the federal government’s plan to resettle the 120 Bantu there. Cayce leaders contended that locating all the Bantu families in their small city across the Congaree River from Columbia would be a financial drain and a drag on its public schools.

Eventually, the Bantu, who are Muslim, were placed throughout Columbia, sponsored through Lutheran Family Services and congregations that helped guide the families through the cultural transformation.

As time went on, most of the Somali Bantu families left the Midlands to join other relatives across the United States. Of the original 25 families, only seven remain, said Habeeb Abdullaah, a member of the Islamic Center of Columbia. Those families worship at the mosque, and many of the children, including Mabruk, were tutored in English there.

The families are scattered to places “as far-flung as Washington state to South Dakota,” Abdullaah said.

Despite the language and cultural barriers, the transition to the United States was an exciting one for Mabruk.

St. Peter’s Catholic Church agreed to sponsor the family, and church members were immediately impressed by Aden’s drive to succeed.

“He got off of the plane and almost immediately said, ‘I want to learn English,’” said Emily Hero, director of parish life for St. Peter’s Catholic Church. “He is so driven to learn.”

His siblings, including a younger sister and two younger brothers, are similarly motivated, she said.

“This family was a little different from the other families,” because the father had died in the refugee camp, she said. “I think there was a big commitment on the part of St. Peter’s because she did not have the spouse.” Aden and his siblings also were helped by a USC tutoring program in his apartment community founded by education professor Doyle Stevick to aid the Somali Bantu children.

Aden’s mother works full time and continues her effort to master English. But her son acknowledges that the Somali Bantu parents still struggle with English even five years after their arrival, while the children have rapidly assimilated.

The Bantu have no written language, so some cannot yet even spell their names.

“I don’t know why right now, a lot of parents really wish they could go back to their country,” he said. “I wish our parents’ dreams could come true, but it’s life.”

‘A part of this family’

As he toiled away at his studies and his English, Aden remained largely isolated with a few Somali Bantu friends until he came to Richland Northeast and began to run cross-country.

“I really didn’t have any friends, but cross-country was the main door. I got to know so many people,” he said.

In 2007, he joined the school’s Youth Action Council, which promotes civic engagement and involvement in service projects. “That built up my leadership. That really changed me,” he said.

Kim Sanders, a Richland Northeast guidance counselor and adviser to YAC, remembers the shy, bespectacled boy who came to the tutoring and testing center every day to work on his studies. At first, he could barely speak the language, but when he was asked to invite the faculty to a council event, he practiced and practiced his line until he got it right.

“It was neat to see,” she recalled. “Here is this boy you barely understand and he is going before the entire faculty to invite them to a service learning luncheon.”

Eventually, Aden gained so much confidence and language facility that he made a presentation at a national service learning conference in Nashville, Tenn., last year, she said. But along the way, he also felt open enough to share the struggles of the Somali Bantu community in Columbia.

He became a citizen of RNE, she said. “Long before he could get his U.S. citizenship, he became a part of this family,” Sanders said. “It is a total transformation of this very quiet boy. I know that he will succeed because he has that reliance and perseverance. He is just a phenomenal young man.”

For now, Aden is focusing his dreams on mastering written English so he can go on to college. He skipped the final week of high school to enroll in an intensive summer English immersion study at USC that began Monday, although he will take time off this morning to walk with the 303 other RNE graduates.

For the summer, he will take up residence at the home of his English as a second language teacher, Vickie Westbrook, who is making sure he has transportation to USC for the daily 8 a.m.-5 p.m. classes.

“I am always thinking that I am going to make a difference,” Aden said. One day, he said, he may return to Africa. “I always wanted to make a difference, especially with the Somali Bantu children.”

A couple both aged 13 got married in Salahley town, about 60km south of Hargeisa, the capital of the breakaway region of Somaliland in northern Somalia. Hundreds of family members and friends thronged the married grounds as Shaba’n Mohamed and his lovely wife Naima Osman tied the nuptial knot.“I was not thinking that this number will participate in our wedding,” Mohamed with his wife Naima told AfricaNews.

That function was arranged by Telsom, a telecoms company that employed all the bridegrooms.

The Supreme Court on Tuesday refused to block a lawsuit against a former prime minister of Somalia over claims that he oversaw killings and torture in his home country. The high court said it will allow lawsuits against Mohamed Ali Samantar to go forward despite his claims of immunity under the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act. However, the court warned that the U.S. District Court will have to decide whether Samantar can access other claims of immunity that could stop the trial.

The court’s decision could have broad foreign policy implications. Allowing lawsuits against former foreign officials living in the United States could increase the likelihood that U.S. officials would be sued in overseas courts. A rise in the number of U.S. lawsuits dealing with past actions in foreign countries could also affect the United States’ current ties with those countries.

Omar Jamal, the first secretary of the Somali mission at the United Nations, said the court’s decision could result in “baseless” lawsuits that “probably will jam the courts.”

“The court has spoken, and therefore we have to live with that,” he said in a statement.

Samantar was defence minister and prime minister of Somalia in the 1980s and early 1990s under dictator Siad Barre.

He now lives in Virginia. He is being sued under the Torture Victim Protection Act by Somalis living in the United States who were subjected to persecution in the 1980s. They say Samantar was in charge of military forces that tortured, killed or detained them or members of their families.

A federal judge had thrown out the lawsuits against Samantar, saying he is entitled to diplomatic immunity under the FSIA. That law says “a foreign state shall be immune from the jurisdiction” of federal and state courts in most lawsuits. The federal judge said that protection extends to “an individual acting in his official capacity on behalf of a foreign state.”

The 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reversed, saying that immunity does not extend to individuals, only to foreign states and their agencies.

The high court upheld that ruling.

“There is nothing to suggest we should read ‘foreign state’ …to include an official acting on behalf of the foreign state, and much to indicate that this meaning was not what Congress enacted,” said retiring Justice John Paul Stevens, writing the unanimous judgment for the court. “The text does not foreclose petitioner’s reading, but it supports the view of respondents and the United States that the Act does not address an official’s claim to immunity.”

The court said its decision does not mean that the lawsuit against Samantar automatically goes forward.

“Whether petitioner may be entitled to immunity under the common law, and whether he may have other valid defences to the grave charges against him, are matters to be addressed in the first instance by the District Court on remand,” Stevens said.

France will push for Africa to have membership of the G20 economies in a similar capacity to the European Union when it takes helm of the group next year, a French political source said.

France is using the 25th Africa-France summit, which ends in Nice today, to pave the way for reform proposals at next year’s G8/G20 meetings, aimed at giving Africa more of a say on the international stage.

“They (African leaders) are quite enthusiastic that we want to make the African Union a permanent member of the G20 like the presidency of the European Commission,” the source said late last night.

South Africa is the only African state represented on the group of the world’s richest economies.

French president Nicolas Sarkozy said yesterday it was time for the world to make a place for Africa on the global stage to discuss international crises and reform, calling for the United Nations to be reformed and Africa to have a permanent member of the Security Council.

The source said the African leaders had agreed to discuss proposals for an interim reform on the Security Council at the next African Union summit.

African nations have been asking for two rotating permanent seats since 2005, given the continent has about 27 per cent of members at the United Nations, its size and the involvement of global powers on its territory.

The source said France had suggested a compromise, whereby there would now be three categories of membership on the Security Council: permanent members, members elected in the current system and a third option of members elected for five or six years.

China, the United States, Russia, Britain and France are the permanent members of the Council. Opec member Nigeria, Gabon and Uganda are among 10 members that hold rotating seats.

“They have accepted to discuss that at the next African Union summit in Kampala in a month … we think it (the issue) has really made a lot of progress,” the source said.

NAIROBI — Agence France-Presse’s Somalia correspondent Mustafa Haji Abdinur has been awarded the CNN Multichoice African Journalist of the Year Award in the Free Press category.

Abdinur, 28, who has been AFP’s Mogadishu-based correspondent since 2006, was among several African journalists recognised at the ceremony in the Ugandan capital Kampala on Saturday.

“Friends, I live in a country whose name has unfortunately become a synonym for lawlessness, where human life is not worth a lot and where press freedom simply does not exist,” said Abdinur.

He was chosen “for his work in Somalia including the ‘Peace Journalism’ initiative which he launched with the help of fellow Somali journalists earlier this year,” organisers said.

The CNN Multichoice Free Press Africa Award has previously been presented to the late Deyda Hydara from Gambia and the imprisoned Eritrean journalist Seyoum Tsehaye Musa Saidykhan.

The CNN African Journalist of the Year Award was founded in 1995 by Edward Boateng and the late Mohamed Amin to recognise and encourage excellence in journalism throughout Africa.

In November 2009, Abdinur won the Committee to Protect Journalists’ (CPJ) International Press Freedom Awards.

A Somali diplomat said Thursday he is concerned that a member of the al-Shabaab terrorist group from his country may be trying to get into Texas through Mexico. 

But Omar Jamal, first secretary of the Somali mission at the United Nations, added that he fears oppressed Somalis in Latin America trying to gain asylum in the U.S. will get caught up in a terror alert issued by American authorities.

U.S. Homeland Security has asked law enforcement in Houston to be on the lookout for a suspected member of al-Shabaab, an al-Qaida ally based in Somalia.

Jamal said his nation “is in a constant battle with al-Shabaab” and urged American authorities “to be careful who is bad and good in this new alarm.”

The impoverished Horn of Africa nation is caught up in an Islamic insurgency and has not had a functioning government since 1991. It also is home to pirates who have been seizing vessels for ransom in the Indian Ocean.

Jamal said his UN mission for months has been fielding inquiries from Somalis who believe missing loved ones throughout Central and South America are trying to flee to the United States.

“We don’t want them to get caught in the middle of this war on terror,” he said.

He encouraged law enforcement authorities to pursue leads “if they have a lead.”

“But they also need to be very careful and vigilant of those who are really innocent,” he said.

Harris County Sheriff’s Department officials have confirmed the terror alert but refused to discuss specifics. A Houston Police Department spokesman said the department doesn’t publicly discuss such matters. U.S. Customs and Border Protection said they don’t discuss specific intelligence matters.

Jamal said he learned of the alert earlier this week.

“They’re trying to be extra cautious, but we didn’t think it was that much of a situation,” he said. “We’ve been working with them on this issue for a very long time.

“It’s not the first time.”

Raqiya Abdalla of the Fairfax, Virginia-based Somali Family Care Network said her advocacy group has no official estimate of the number of Somalis in the U.S., but said a fair estimate would be 200,000.

The alert issued last week came after federal prosecutors added new charges earlier this month against a 24-year-old Somali man, Ahmed Muhammed Dhakane, who had been picked up in Brownsville in 2008.

He pleaded not guilty May 14 in federal court in San Antonio to three counts of immigration fraud.

Without elaborating, authorities in Harris County, which includes Houston, have confirmed a connection between Dhakane’s case and the Homeland Security alert.

Dhakane is accused of making false statements under oath in support of his application for asylum.

According to his indictment, Dhakane failed to disclose that he was a member or associate of the al-Barakat financial transfer network and Al-Ittihad al-Islami, or the Islamic Union, which wants to impose Islamic law in Somalia. Both are on the Treasury Department’s list of global terrorist groups with links to al-Qaida, according to the indictment.

Survivors of the Israeli assault on a flotilla carrying relief supplies to Gaza returned to Greece and Turkey today, giving the first eyewitness accounts of the raid in which at least 10 people died.

Arriving at Istanbul’s Ataturk airport with her one-year-old baby, Turkish activist Nilufer Cetin said Israeli troops opened fire before boarding the Turkish-flagged ferry Mavi Marmara, which was the scene of the worst clashes and all the fatalities. Israeli officials have said that the use of armed force began when its boarding party was attacked.

“It was extremely bad and very tough clashes took place. The Mavi Marmara is filled with blood,” said Cetin, whose husband is the Mavi Marmara’s chief engineer.

She told reporters that she and her child hid in the bathroom of their cabin during the confrontation. “The operation started immediately with firing. First it was warning shots, but when the Mavi Marmara wouldn’t stop these warnings turned into an attack,” she said.

“There were sound and smoke bombs and later they used gas bombs. Following the bombings they started to come on board from helicopters.”

Cetin is among a handful of Turkish activists to be released; more than 300 remain in Israeli custody. She said she agreed to extradition from Israel after she was warned that conditions in jail would be too harsh for her child.

“I am one of the first passengers to be sent home, just because I have baby. When we arrived at the Israeli port of Ashdod we were met by the Israeli interior and foreign ministry officials and police; there were no soldiers. They asked me only a few questions. But they took everything – cameras, laptops, cellphones, personal belongings including our clothes,” she said.

Kutlu Tiryaki was a captain of another vessel in the flotilla. “We continuously told them we did not have weapons, we came here to bring humanitarian help and not to fight,” he said.

“The attack on the Mavi Marmara came in an instant: they attacked it with 12 or 13 attack boats and also with commandos from helicopters. We heard the gunshots over our portable radio handsets, which we used to communicate with the Mavi Marmara, because our ship communication system was disrupted. There were three or four helicopters also used in the attack. We were told by Mavi Marmara their crew and civilians were being shot at and windows and doors were being broken by Israelis.”

Six Greek activists who returned to Athens accused Israeli commandos of using electric shocks during the raid.

Dimitris Gielalis, who had been aboard the Sfendoni, told reporters: “Suddenly from everywhere we saw inflatables coming at us, and within seconds fully equipped commandos came up on the boat. They came up and used plastic bullets, we had beatings, we had electric shocks, any method we can think of, they used.”

Michalis Grigoropoulos, who was at the wheel of the Free Mediterranean, said: “We were in international waters. The Israelis acted like pirates, completely out of the normal way that they conduct nautical exercises, and seized our ship. They took us hostage, pointing guns at our heads; they descended from helicopters and fired tear gas and bullets. There was absolutely nothing we could do … Those who tried to resist forming a human ring on the bridge were given electric shocks.”

Grigoropoulos, who insisted the ship was full of humanitarian aid bound for Gaza “and nothing more”, said that, once detained, the human rights activists were not allowed to contact a lawyer or the Greek embassy in Tel Aviv. “They didn’t let us go to the toilet, eat or drink water and throughout they videoed us. They confiscated everything, mobile phones, laptops, cameras and personal effects. They only allowed us to keep our papers.”

Turkey said it was sending three ambulance planes to Israel to pick up 20 more Turkish activists injured in the operation.

Three Turkish Airlines planes were on standby, waiting to fly back other activists, the prime minister’s office said.

The son of famed TV newsman Ted Koppel has reportedly died.

Andrew Koppel, 40, was found early Monday morning and declared dead at 1:30 a.m. in a rundown apartment in Washington Heights, according to The Associated Press.

Koppel was reportedly drinking heavily on Sunday night, the New York Post reports, and was with a man he’d met at a bar in Hell’s Kitchen.

“We took him to the bedroom and laid him down to rest,” said Belinda Caban, who lived at the apartment.

“His complexion wasn’t right. It was pale. I said to call the police,” she said. “When the ambulance came, they said he was dead.”

No one has been charged, and the exact cause of death has not yet been determined.

Koppel, one of Ted Koppel’s four children, is the ex-ABC newsman’s only son.