Frank Viviano Writes Mysterious path from San Jose to
Jordanian gallows
- Amman, Jordan — No one is more bewildered than Mohammed
Hijazi by the strange, circuitous road that carried his Bay Area-born
son from San Jose to the shadow of a Middle Eastern gallows,
accused of having links to Osama bin Laden.- As U.S. and British military forces strike at bin Laden and
his Taliban backers in Afghanistan, that grim destination looks
ever more final for Hijazi’s 32-year-old son, Raed.- Raed Hijazi’s journey has many unexplained gaps and mysterious
passages, from the Afghan-Pakistani frontier to Boston and Jordan,
full of the kind of powerful circumstantial evidence and sensational
media coverage that would make a fair trial difficult anywhere
— much less in a Jordanian criminal justice system that puts
the burden of proof on the accused, rather than on the prosecution.- “My boy has never been a radical of any kind, religious
or political. My boy is not a terrorist,” Hijazi says of
his son, who has already been sentenced to hang for his alleged
role in a thwarted plot to blow up targets in Jordan on the eve
of the millennium.- “You want to know what my Raed is?” Mohammed Hijazi
asks. “He is a typical American, from an ordinary family
that happens to be Muslim.”- But authorities in Jordan and the United States insist that
he was a valued member of bin Laden’s al Qaeda terrorist network
and a chief organizer of the plot to kill Western and Israeli
tourists.- Yesterday, his funds were frozen by the Bush administration.
Hijazi’s assets were listed among those of 39 individuals and
organizations Washington believes have links to terrorist groups.- ANGUISHED PARENT
This is a father speaking, a thin, emotionally distraught man
of 66 who cannot make sense of the nightmare that has enveloped
his family. When he looks at Hijazi, locked in a black-iron defendant’s
cage at Jordan’s State Security Court, he remembers an innocent
toddler in San Jose.- This is also a San Francisco-educated engineer from a moderate,
middle- class Arab world so profoundly shaken by the carnage
of Sept. 11 that it refuses to believe — it cannot allow itself
to believe — that its sons are implicated in the atrocities
allegedly carried out by bin Laden operatives in New York and
Arlington, Va.- Sitting at the dining room table of the family apartment
in central Amman, the senior Hijazi describes his own unabashed
40-year love affair with the United States.- The fascination with America continued after 1971, when the
family relocated to Saudi Arabia, where the elder Hijazi was
employed.- “We took every vacation in the United States — back
to San Francisco, to L. A., to Disneyland, to Florida,”
he says.- In 1987, Mohammed Hijazi accompanied his son to Northern
California to help him find an apartment for the duration of
a two-year program in business administration at California State
University at Sacramento.- After that, the picture becomes cloudy.
- PERSONAL JOURNEY
Raed Hijazi returned to Jordan briefly in 1990, then vanished
for two years — “maybe he went back to the U.S., but I
don’t know where,” his father says. “Maybe he worked,
but I don’t know for sure.”- The portrait of Hijazi that emerges in his father’s account
of the next years is that of an idealistic dreamer in his early
20s. A young man “who always cared about others, always
cared about human rights,” Mohammed Hijazi says.- But he was unable to find a job, unable to remain settled
in one place. He was, in the jargon of his native California,
“unable to find himself” — until 1992, when he set
off on a vague three-year mission to assist refugees along the
Pakistani border with Afghanistan. The area was the epicenter
of al Qaeda’s recruitment and training efforts.- His father doesn’t know the name of the organization for
which Hijazi worked, and Hijazi has not publicly disclosed it.- Afterward came more wandering, more unemployment and increasing
bitterness, especially after Hijazi married and fathered three
children in the late 1990s. In 1997, he was driving a taxi in
Boston — as did one or more alleged hijackers of the planes
that slammed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, say
FBI investigators.- But none of this proves his guilt. Thousands of idealistic
Arabs have donated their labor to refugee camps. Thousands more
have sought work in the United States, in economic hope and desperation.
A period of wandering, far from home and family, is common among
uncertain young college graduates almost everywhere.- INSISTENT ON INNOCENCE
There is nothing incriminating about the fact that Hijazi, with
his untrimmed beard, white skullcap and Koran tightly held in
his chained hands at the State Security Court, is visibly a much
more devout Muslim today than he was as a youngster.- “When he was growing up, the questions we discussed,
in terms of Islam, were very ordinary: What does it mean to go
to Mecca? What are our duties in assisting the poor?” Mohammed
Hijazi says.- Now the younger Hijazi sits and waits, insisting on his innocence.
- “My client denies that he has any connection whatsoever
to Osama bin Laden, ” says his attorney, Taisir Diab.- But in the awful aftermath of Sept. 11, the combination of
Afghanistan, a Boston taxi and fervent religion may add up to
the likelihood that Hijazi will be hanged.
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