Wished he could nuke Washington, DC. Advocated violent jihad in US

Editor's note: This report was updated at 2:10 EST.

Luqman Ameen Abdullah, the imam of Masjid Al Haqq, a Detroit mosque of the National Ummah, a 20-year-old radical Islamic group that “may have ties to charities linked to terrorism financing,” according to a 2009 Virginia intelligence assessment, was shot and killed by the FBI at a trucking and warehouse firm in Dearborn during a series of raids Wednesday in that city and in Detroit while trying to arrest eleven members of the group.

Using undercover informants, the FBI had been investigating Abdullah and his followers in the Detroit area "and [other National Ummah] cells throughout the country" for three years, according to the criminal complaint against the men who were being sought in the raids Wednesday.

Thursday, Detroit police said they are on heightened alert after followers and family members of Abdullaht threatened to retaliate against police. According to the FBI, Adbullah regularly advocated violence against local and federal law enforcement.

A member of the advisory council of the Muslim Alliance in North America, Abdullah was charged with conspiracy to sell stolen goods and illegal possession and sale of firearms, among other alleged criminal activity.

The National Ummah was established in 1987 by former FBI ten most wanted fugitive, Black Panther "Minister of Justice," H. Rapp Brown, who has been known as Jamil Abdullah Al Amin following his conversion to Islam while in prison from 1971 to 1976 for his role in a robbery that ended in a shootout with New York police.

The National Imam of the National Ummah, Al Amin’s group is composed mostly of African-American converts to Islam who seek to establish a separate Sharia-law governed state within the United States.

Al Amin currently is serving life in prison without the possibility of parole for the March 2000 shooting that killed Fulton County, Georgia Deputy Sheriff Ricky Kinchen and the wounding of deputy sheriff Aldranon English. The deputies - both African-Americans - were attempting to serve Al Amin a warrant for failing to appear in court to face charges of driving a stolen car and impersonating a police officer.

During Al Amin’s murder trial, the Masjid Al Islam mosque in Los Angeles – which called Al Amin "one of the pillars of our local Islamic communities," declared that his arrest was nothing less than a challenge to "establishing Islam in America."

According to a joint statement from the FBI and the Detroit US Attorney’s Office, “the eleven defendants [charged by the FBI Wednesday] are members of a group that is alleged to have engaged in violent activity over a period of many years and known to be armed.”

Several of the men, including Abdullah, have prior criminal convictions going back to the 1970s. Abdullah reputedly was arrested in 1979 for assault on a police officer.

Three of the men charged in the complaint who were sought during the raids were at large Wednesday night. A 12th man was arrested late Wednesday in connection with the investigation. The three men being sought by the FBI reportedly are from Ontario, Canada and allegedly were part of the radical jihad-promoting Islamic group.

Abdullah had called for “an offensive jihad” against infidels and had advocated "the spread of Islam through violent jihad," according to Detroit FBI Counterterrorism Squad agent Gary Leone in an affidavit that was part of the 43-page criminal complaint.

The complaint further alleged that Abdullah discussed with an undercover informant working for the FBI inside the mosque a variety of attack scenarios, as well as bomb-making and obtaining bomb-making materials. While watching a program that involved a nuclear weapon, Abdullah allegedly stated he just needed "a little bomb" and that his target would be "Washington." 

“In light of the information that the charged individuals were believed to be armed and dangerous, special safeguards were employed by law enforcement to secure the arrests without confrontation,” said a joint FBI-US Attorney statement. “During the arrests … the suspects were ordered to surrender. At one location, four suspects surrendered and were arrested without incident. Luqman Ameen Abdullah [aka Christopher Thomas] did not surrender and fired his weapon. An exchange of gun fire followed and Abdullah was killed.”

According to the Eastern District of Michigan US Attorney's office, Abdullah become a person of interest to the FBI several years ago in part for advocating violence against law enforcement.

The affidavit in support of the criminal complaint against the 11 men stated that “Abdullah … espoused the use of violence against law enforcement, and has trained members of his group in use of firearms and martial arts in anticipation of some type of action against the government. Abdullah and other members of this group were known to carry firearms and other weapons.”

The complaint further stated that Abdullah told informants “America must fall” and that if police ever tried to arrest him he would “just strap a bomb on and blow up everybody.” He also allegedly told followers they should “shoot a cop in the head, and take their [bullet-proof] vest."

FBI Agent Leone also stated Abdullah told mosque members it was their "duty to oppose the FBI and the government and it does not matter if they die," and that "Abdullah preaches that every Muslim should have a weapon, and should not be scared to use their weapon when needed ... He regularly preaches anti-government and anti-law enforcement rhetoric."

The men were charged “with conspiracy to commit several federal crimes, including theft from interstate shipments, mail fraud to obtain the proceeds of arson, illegal possession and sale of firearms, and tampering with motor vehicle identification numbers,” the FBI-US Attorney statement said.

Similarly, in 1995, two of the group’s members were convicted of illegally shipping nearly 1,000 firearms to groups in Detroit and Philadelphia, and to an Islamic group linked to Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, who is currently serving a life sentence stemming from the federal government’s investigation of the Al Qaeda-linked bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993. Followers of Rahman carried out the bombing.

The FBI got Rahman on tape issuing a fatwa encouraging violence against US civilian targets in the New York and New Jersey, including a plot to bomb the United Nations, the Lincoln and Holland tunnels, the George Washington Bridge, and a federal building housing an FBI office. Federal prosecutors also obtained videotapes of Rahman followers mixing the ingredients for a large bomb.

Dawud Walid, the executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Affairs, told Al Jazeera Abdullah "was well known and respected. No one that I have talked has said that he was linked to any sort of extremist groups, overseas or here at home."

"I do not have any knowledge as to the veracity of the allegations, but if the allegations are true, what does that have to do with Islam or Muslims?" Walid said, adding "the charges that have been filed against the 11 suspects have no relation or linkage to their religion - they are gun charges. We resent the fact that the FBI has linked religion to these gun charges."

According to the criminal complaint, however, the violence advocated by Abdullah and the criminal activity he was charged with were integral to his belief that jihad in America needed to be waged violently in order to bring about an Islamic United States. The complaint is a disturbing read.

By 1980, Al Amin had become spiritual leader-imam of over thirty National Ummah Islamic centers following his founding of the group after his conversion to Islam through his contact with Dar ul Islam, a radical Islamic group originating in Indonesia.

According to the 2009 Virginia Terrorism Threat Assessment, intelligence indicates that the Iqaamatiddeen Movement (IM), a splinter group of the US branch of Dar ul Islam, is linked to Al Amin’s National Ummah and shares its basic ideology. The assessment stated that IM “identifies itself as an Islamic revival movement; however, the philosophy appears to be a mix of African-American nationalism and Islamic fundamentalism.”

“By early 2005, IM was discussing its goal to establish an autonomous Muslim state in the US and was coordinating with like-minded US groups to form a coalition focused on this Islamic state creation,” according to the assessment, which noted “the IM is linked to several individuals in the US and abroad who have been identified as having possible ties with terrorism, including two Saudis who are allegedly supporters of Usama bin Laden.”

In November 2006, the FBI reputedly was investigating an IM mosque in Brooklyn, New York in response to intelligence that it was trying to radicalize US born Muslims.

In his 1994 book. Revolution by the Book, Al Amin wrote that "when we begin to look critically at the Constitution of the United States, we see that in its main essence it is diametrically opposed to what Allah has commanded."

During the period he was a leader of the Black Panthers, Al Amin stated that "violence is as American as cherry pie” and that "if America don't come around, we're gonna burn it down.”

A former Black Panther colleague of Al Amin was Angela Davis, who also was a prominent Communist Party USA member and political candidate in the early 1980s.

Davis was a notorious black nationalist from the mid-1960s through the early 1970s, at which time she became the subject of an intense manhunt and a FBI “Most Wanted” designee after a shotgun registered to her was used during the killing of a judge in an attempt to free a black convict.

Davis eventually was caught, tried and acquitted because the jury decided that just because she owned one of the guns used in the judge’s murder it was not sufficient to establish her involvement in the plot. She temporarily relocated to Cuba following her acquittal.