Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, June 26, 1993 TAG: 9306260146
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: NEW YORK LENGTH: Medium
Siddig Ibrahim Siddig Ali, 32, and seven other men were held without bail Friday in a vast bombing and assassination scheme.
Unlike the shadowy terrorists of fiction, Siddig liked a high profile. He was a fixture at El Sayyid Nosair's trial on charges of murdering militant Rabbi Meir Kahane, he has raised funds for the World Trade Center bombing defendants and has translated for Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman at some of the blind Muslim preacher's most publicized appearances.
If the FBI complaint against him is accurate, Siddig made some serious mistakes: In need of an explosives expert, he didn't recruit someone he knew well or insist on someone who had been passed through several intermediaries.
Instead, he allegedly took on a man he'd known a short time, and the man turned out to be an informer. Siddig allegedly told him - though the plot in no way required the disclosure - of plans to blow up the United Nations, two Hudson River commuter tunnels and a federal building in lower Manhattan.
Siddig apparently knew of the risk of electronic eavesdropping, but his idea of subterfuge, the FBI said, was to refer to the United Nations as "The Big House" and the federal building as "The Center."
His plans for the latter? Siddig suggested, according to the complaint, that his band might get inside by killing the security guards outside. This prompted New York Newsday columnist Murray Kempton to wonder how someone could think of "a shootout in a public plaza as a discreet prelude" to a bombing.
Siddig also allegedly talked of his participation in tests to prepare for the Trade Center bombing and boasted of "connections" that would get a car bomb under the United Nations.
In May, the New York Post said the FBI had learned Arab terrorists had targeted state Assemblyman Dov Hikind for killing - a reference, it now appears, to Siddig's group. But the alleged mastermind apparently never noticed anyone was on to him.
All this recalls the seeming naivete and ineptitude of the Trade Center suspects, who used their real names and had apparently incriminating evidence in their homes, who lived, worshiped and protested together.
Born in the Sudan in 1960, Siddig came to the United States in 1988, settled in the Bronx and got a job driving a cab. By 1992 his driver's license had been revoked twice and suspended twice. He'd also lost his guard's job at a real estate firm because of the recession.
He lived in Jersey City with his wife, a Trinidad native whom he met while wearing the guard's uniform.
by CNB