The Anti-Terrorism Unit of the Kosovo Police, acting on a request from the U.S. Department of Justice, last Thursday, June 17, arrested 29-year old Bajram Asllani, a Kosovar Albanian and one of two suspects who fled North Carolina after law enforcement action 10 months ago against a jihadist conspiracy based in Raleigh.
On Friday, the next day, the European Union police agency in Kosovo, known as EULEX, ordered Asllani released under house arrest, with a requirement that he report to police every two weeks. The decision was based, according to EULEX judge Agnieszka Kolowiecka-Milar, on the lack of an extradition treaty between the U.S. and Kosovo. EULEX spokesperson Kristiina Herodes said, “The prosecutor will have a close look at the written decision by the judge and then will decide to appeal against the decision or not.”
The release of Asllani, visible on American television in the flowing beard affected by radical Islamists, was alarming in that he had previously been held under house arrest by the Kosovo authorities, based on a 2007 terrorism charge, and escaped to North Carolina.
The handling of Asllani’s case exposed a serious rift between the local Albanian police and European personnel charged with law enforcement in the Balkan republic, which reproduces the wider conflict between American and European attitudes towards terror suspects. The Kosovar Albanians, however, have taken the American position, in favor of detention and extradition. Kosovo Albanians have supported local officers in a series of arrests of preachers and propagandists representing the Saudi-financed ultrafundamentalist Wahhabi Muslim sect. Most recently, two Kosovar Albanians and three Bosnian Muslims were arrested in the southern Kosovo district of Prizren.
A revised criminal complaint prepared in April and unsealed two weeks ago, added Asllani’s name to that of eight other participants in the Raleigh network. Asllani had proposed to the North Carolina conspirators that they move to a Kosovo village in which they could presumably remain concealed while preparing for jihad. Asllani is charged with material aid to terrorists and conspiracy to commit violent acts.
The North Carolina jihad group was apparently led by three American-born converts to Islam, Daniel Boyd, 39, and his sons Dylan, 22, and Zakariya, 20. Boyd and another Kosovar Albanian and legal resident of the U.S., Hysen Sherifi, 25, were joined in the original indictment by three more U.S. citizens: Mohammad Omar Aly Hassan, 22; and Ziyad Yaghi, 21, and a naturalized American but Bosnian by birth, Anes Subasic, 33. Boyd and Sherifi are charged with planning an attack on the U.S. Marine base at Camp Quantico, Va., among other jihad actions.
The lately caught-and-released Asllani, with his 2007 arrest, was not the only member of the North Carolina cell, with a past that bears closer scrutiny. Daniel Boyd, as was barely noted at the time of his arrest last year, had gone to Gaza with one of his sons in 2006, and was prevented by the Israelis from travelling there again in 2007, this time with the intention of introducing both his sons to battle.
The ninth wanted individual, Jude Kenan Mohammad, 20, is believed to have escaped to Pakistan.