The next speakers were 12 year old Leijla Duka, daughter of one of the Ft. Dix 5 (NJ) and her uncle, the youngest of the Duka brothers. The Ft. Dix 5 were convicted of conspiring to attack military personnel at Ft. Dix and kill as many as possible. Leijla and her uncle said that their family members were set-up by 2 Muslim agent provocateurs, Mahmoud Omar and Besnik Bakalli.

Both men had been convicted of serious crimes and were willing to act as agents in return for leniency and money. It all started, they explained, with a family vacation in the Poconos when a family member made a video recording of the young men on a shooting range, shooting and shouting “Allahu Akbar”, God is great. After the vacation the recording was brought to a Circuit City store to be duplicated so that everyone involved could have a copy. The clerk was suspicious when he viewed the video and notified the police who contacted the FBI.

[The FBI] sent in Omar who approached one of the men, befriended him, and convinced him to download terrorist videos. All of the videos watched were at the agent’s request and then he tried to persuade him to involve his friends, the other 4.

When [Omar] didn’t do so the other agent, Bakalli, an ethnic Albanian like the Dukas was brought in. The agents told the men that their Muslim brothers were being murdered overseas and that they should be ashamed of themselves because they were doing nothing to help them. A lot of money was being flashed around by the agents and weapons were offered for sale. Some of the men bought weapons so, they said, they wouldn’t have to wait to shoot at the shooting range. One, who worked at a pizza shop, showed the agent a map of Ft. Dix (used for pizza delivery) when the agent asked for one. Duka said that for a conspiracy case 2 or more defendants have to agree to a plot involving someplace or someone. That never happened in this case. The government admitted that there was no evidence that the defendants ever discussed the plot with each other. All 5 were arrested and at trial the judge said that millions had been spent on the case and “the lack of evidence doesn’t concern me.” Duka also explained that all of the jury members were either in the army or had family members in the army. Since they were personally involved in some way they should have been excluded. The prosecution showed frightening jihad films. All were convicted with some getting sentences of life plus 30 years.

The agent provocateur in that case was the same person that was involved in the Newburgh 4 case, but using a different name this time. He was facing a prison sentence for selling fake drivers licenses, there was 25 civil suits pending against him, and there was the possibility of him being deported to Pakistan where it is believed that he was wanted for murder. The FBI was primarily interested in Yassin Aref, a local imam who spoke against the war and for Palestinian rights. Mohammad Hossain was collateral damage.

The plot, as it was explained, was to get the men involved in purchasing a surface to air missile with money laundered through Hossain’s pizza business. That would be used to shoot down a plane with the Pakistani UN ambassador on it. Hossain needed a loan which was offered by the agent, and Aref, the imam, was asked to witness the loan, as is a Muslim custom.

The money used for the $5,000 loan supposedly came from money that was earned by selling weapons to terrorists. There is no evidence that the men, especially Aref, knew anything about where the money came from or of the missile plot, but the fact of Aref witnessing the loan tied him to terrorists. Both were arrested, convicted, and got 15 year prison sentences.