http://www.dallasnews.com/news/community-news/plano/headlines/20120118-family-of-man-thought-to-be-al-qaeda-operative-is-known-for-interfaith-work-in-north-texas.ece
For the Salam family’s fellow volunteers in North Texas interfaith activities, the idea that they could have a son in al-Qaeda seemed preposterous.
“He could not be in al-Qaeda, knowing his parents,” said Mike Ghouse, president of the Foundation for Pluralism in Dallas.
And yet, according to The Associated Press, when Moeed Abdul Salam died in Pakistan late last year, he was an al-Qaeda operative. Pakistani officials say he killed himself with a hand grenade. An Islamic media group said troops killed him.
His family lives in Plano, in a two-story house on a suburban street. A woman inside the house on Wednesday would not open the door or speak to a reporter.
That doesn’t surprise Christopher Parr, former chairman of the Plano Multicultural Outreach Roundtable, where Moeed Salam’s mother, Hasna Shaheen Salam, is a co-chair.
“She doesn’t want to talk about it because it is too painful,” he said.
The Salams had never mentioned a son in Pakistan, he said. Other members of the roundtable learned about his death only when contacted by an AP reporter. That’s when Parr called his friend, he said.
“She said they didn’t know where he was or what he was doing,” he said.
Parr met Shaheen Salam, a fellow Rotarian, several years ago. Not long afterward, she joined the Plano roundtable, where she was a liaison to the North Texas Muslim community, Parr said.
According to public records, Shaheen Salam lives in the Plano home with her husband, Mohammed. The house is worth about $400,000. Moeed Salam’s driver’s license also lists that address. In addition, the home is the address of record for several businesses, at least one of them closed because of bankruptcy in 2005.
Bankruptcy documents listed secured debt of $186,000 and unsecured debt of $980,000. They listed at least $442,000 owed on at least 17 credit card accounts.
According to a piece Shaheen Salam wrote for the January 2011 edition of the “Lone Star Crescent,” a Texas Muslim publication, she herself had traveled to Pakistan in 2010. According to the article, she went there to facilitate the adoption of an infant girl by her daughter, a Dallas physician who was unable to make the trip. She makes no mention of Moeed Salam.
Moeed’s brother Monem Salam is a graduate of the University of Texas at Dallas, a former Morgan Stanley money manager in Dallas and a former executive council member of the Islamic Society of North America. The society was an unindicted co-conspirator in the federal criminal case against the North Texas-based Holy Land Foundation. Foundation leaders were convicted of funneling money to Hamas.
According to the AP, Moeed Salam, who was 37 when he died, had not lived in Plano for many years. He attended boarding school in Connecticut, attended college at the University of Texas in Austin, and had moved overseas at least eight years ago.
However Moeed Salam’s thoughts about the West had mutated, Ghouse said that the family remained more than casually involved with volunteer work in North Texas and beyond. Shaheen Salam has served as a president of the Texas Muslim Women’s Foundation. And a few years ago, Ghouse said, she had taken wheelchairs to Afghanistan.
“The one thing I can tell you is that his parents had nothing to do with it,” he said of Moeed Salam’s apparent al-Qaeda connection. “His mother would not have put up with it.”
Mohamed Elibiary, a Muslim interfaith advocate, said the family members “were pillars of the community as I was growing up” in North Texas.
“The family members are victims in all this,” said Elibiary, a Department of Homeland Security adviser who has assisted the FBI in multiple investigations of homegrown terrorism. “They did everything to try to set a good example, not only inside their own family but by being good citizens and good Muslims.”
Staff writer Brooks Egerton contributed to this report.
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Mike Ghouse
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