Rats and Squealers by Gordon Kerr

Author:Gordon Kerr [Kerr, Gordon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: traitors, treachery, snitch, squealer, Benedict Arnold, Judas, back-stabber, betrayer, conspirator defector, double-crosser, fink, informer, quisling, rebel, renegade, snake, sneak, spy, turncoat, whistle-blower
Publisher: Canary Press eBooks
Published: 2013-09-02T22:00:00+00:00

EMAD SALEM

‘You were informed. Everything is ready. The day and the time. Boom! Lock them up and that’s that.’

That is what FBI informant Emad Salem had thought would happen. Thanks to the incompetence of the FBI, however, it did not and six people lost their lives in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Centre.

In January, 1993, the biggest and most complicated terrorism trial ever to come before an American court, opened in Lower Manhattan. There were twelve defendants, mostly Arab-speaking Muslims, the most important of which was Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, a blind, Egyptian-born religious leader. They were charged with plotting a jihad or religious war against the United States and their plans included the blowing up of the Lincoln and Holland Tunnels, the United Nations, the Federal Office Building in lower Manhattan as well as other well-known landmarks in New York City because of America’s support for Israel and the Egyptian government.

Rahman and the other defendants had been held in custody following the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Centre in New York. In their ‘war of urban terrorism’ they were also found to have been involved in the assassination, in 1990, of Rabbi Meier Kahane, founder of both the controversial Jewish Defence League and Kach, an Israeli political party which became outlawed in Israel because of its extremist policies. Kahane was assassinated after giving a speech in the Marriott Hotel in New York. El Sayyid Nosair was arrested but acquitted of his murder. But, although he was found guilty and sent to prison on gun-possession charges, Nosair still masterminded many of the group’s actions from his prison cell. He stood in the dock alongside Rahman as one of the twelve defendants.

The key witness in the trial was Emad Salem, a former Egyptian Army officer who had succeeded in infiltrating Rahman’s group at the Jersey City mosque where the blind man preached. Salem, who had been placed in a witness protection programme in July 1993, was described as an Egyptian intelligence official. He had entered the army as a private and during his seventeen-year career had fought in the 1973 war with Israel and had been pensioned out as a senior officer while continuing to work for the Egyptian intelligence services. The woman he married, after re-locating to the United States from Cairo in 1987, Barbara Rogers, claimed he was in fact an Egyptian double agent. His stories to Rogers, however, that he worked in intelligence and was one of President Sadat’s bodyguards were made up to impress her, he later claimed. He had served in the Egyptian Army for seventeen years, though, and had left behind in Egypt a wife and two children. But Salem found life to be tough in America. ‘I was like a big shot in Egypt, and all of a sudden I became just an immigrant,’ he said. He earned a living driving a taxi or working as security in department stores.

He told plenty of other lies to Nancy Floyd, the FBI agent who recruited him to work as an informer.

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