Nov 30, 2006 6:59 pm US/Central
FBI Arrests UT Dallas Student On Gun Charge
Investigation Linked To Taliban Conspiracy Indictments
by Robert Riggs
RICHARDSON (CBS 11 News) ―
FBI agents arrested 19-year-old Syed Maaz Shah on his way to take a final exam on the University of Texas at Dallas campus.
The Pakistani national is a sophomore electrical engineering student and secretary of UTD's Muslim Student Association.
Maaz Shah, who attended high school in Houston and currently lives in Richardson, was arrested for possession of a firearm by a non U.S. citizen according to the FBI.
Federal law enforcement sources say Shah surfaced in a Houston-based investigation of an alleged conspiracy to aid the Taliban.
Ahmed Subhani, the president of UTD's Muslim Student Association declined to do an on camera interview with CBS 11 on advice from Shah's attorney. Subhani told CBS 11 that he did not believe the allegations and says that Shah had not expressed support for the Taliban.
Shah's arrest stems from the indictment of two Houston college students who are accused in a federal indictment of aiding the Taliban. On Tuesday FBI agents there arrested 33-year old U.S. citizen Kobie Williams, also known as Abdul Kabeer or Abdul Kabir, and 29-year old Adnan Mirza, who is a Pakistani National reared in Kuwait.
Williams pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to aid the Taliban and admitted to firearms training and contributing $350 to support the Taliban.
The indictment accused the pair of "conducting firearms and paramilitary training to hone their skills… to fight with the Taliban to engage in a battlefield jihad." And the indictment alleged that the men "viewed the United States and Coalition military forces on the ground in Afghanistan and Iraq as invaders."
CBS 11 found a web posting on UTD's Muslim Student Association forum in which Shah expressed similar views and praised a video of insurgents building roadside bombs in Iraq to kill American troops. The Association pulled the entire forum off their web page after being contacted by CBS 11. You can see the video by
clicking here. According to other blogs found by CBS 11, Shah was born in Karachi and had recently lived in Abu Dhabi and the United Arab Emirates. In a January 2003 posting on the Young Muslims of North America Forum Maaz Shah agreed with a blogger's view about 9-11 who wrote, "I felt that America was getting wat (sic) was comin (sic) to them.(600,000 dead Iraqi children, forget the 3000 Americans)"
In September of 2004, Shah appeared awed by a discussion entitled Islam Under the Swastika and speculated how a different outcome of World War Two would have been beneficial for Islam, "…by god (sic) just imagine the Islamic Empire combined with Japan Italy and Germany, in WWII, damn just the thought is overwhelming." Two years later in February of 2006 Shah took offense when a blogger wrote critically about Germans, "I myself have ties to the German race... I won't go into detail... but also I admire the German war machine of World War II... I just love it... war games, movies, games, anything to do with that genre is a favorite of mine... It's kind of an obsession."
Shah is scheduled to be arraigned on the weapons charge before a federal judge in Dallas on Friday.
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