The Houston Chronicle reports on the arrest of Daniel Joseph Maldonado, aka Daniel Aljughaifi. Maldonado is charged with “receiving training from a foreign terrorist organization and conspiring to use a weapon of mass destruction outside the U.S.,” and was escorted back to Houston from Kenya by two FBI agents on Monday. Maldonado was arrested in Kenya after fleeing from Somalia, where he allegedly trained with al Qaeda members under the direction of the Islamic Courts Union. Lone Star Times has the scoop on Maldonado’s brief stint as a blogger:
Let me preface what follows with the BIG disclaimer that everything I’m about to write is entirely circumstantial.
That said, there only appears to be one Daniel Aljughaifi bouncing around the Internet… and he has a blog.
He also appears to be an administrator and heavily involved with an online forum called The Islamic Network, although his last activity on the site appears to have been on 9/16/06.
Maybe we’re talking about two completely separate Daniel Aljughaifis here, in which case I apologize.
But not too much, since the Daniel Aljughaifi I’ve identified in the Islamic Network forum seems content to bitch about how unfair it was to convict Holocaust denier David Irving in Austria.
Other tidbits I noticed-Aljughaifi claims to be “half Puerto Rican and half white” and is “married to a black woman.” Good for him.
Also, a different forum user in April complained that Aljughaifi had suddenly dropped out of sight, and someone else named “Talib” (i.e, “student,” the root of the word “Taliban”) says they are looking to contact “Daniel” themselves.
Lone Star also points out this ridiculous sentence in the Chronicle story:
Al-Qaida is blamed for the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people at the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon in Arlington, Va.
Yes, al Qaeda is blamed for the attacks, because they did it!
