Ummah Wide: Over the last few months there has been a lot of talk about the Murder of Michael Brown and the incredible organizing and response by the community there in Ferguson, Missouri, which I know you have been a part of Imam Dawud. Beyond that as it relates to issues of extra-judicial murder there was the killing by drone of the American citizen Anwar al-Awlaki and his sixteen year old son Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, by the United States government. However, there is one murder in particular in the context of the “war on terror” that really is not talked about and that is the murder of Imam Luqman Abdullah in Dearborn, Michigan on October 28th, 2009. I know that you and CAIR Michigan have been on the forefront of trying to bring justice for Imam Luqman and representing him and his family in the courts in this wrongful death suit that you brought against the FBI. Can you tell us about the murder of Imam Luqman, the context of what happened that day in Dearborn, who he was, and what role he played in the larger community in Detroit?

Imam Dawud Walid: Imam Luqman Abdullah led a small congregation in Detroit called Masjid al-Haqq (The Mosque of the Truth). He had led that congregation for a couple of decades in one of the poorest sections of Detroit, which at that time as it is still today, is the poorest major city in America. Imam Luqman was known in that particular community as someone who helped the disenfranchised people, he helped organize a local soup kitchen that was ran out of the Mosque on Sundays. Most of the people that were fed there for years and years were people of different faiths, he also allowed people to use the prayer area as a place to sleep, many of whom were returning citizens (formerly incarcerated) who had become homeless for a while. Imam Luqman was fiery in his preaching and he was very critical about policies that kept people impoverished and against the individuals who benefited off the structures of oppression including against Arabs and Muslims who owned liquor stores. While he was critical of oppression, I never heard him advocate violence in any way.

Leading up to his murder, Imam Luqman’s mosque was infiltrated by at minimum three informants that we have found through the affidavit. On October 28th, five years ago one of the informants had Imam Luqman drive him to a commercial warehouse in Dearborn, Michigan. This gentleman had passed himself off to the congregation as if he was a White convert to Islam who had money in excess and was offering people odd jobs, and again they are poor. Once they were at the warehouse the Joint Terrorism Task Force executed a raid with 80 law enforcement agents using percussion grenades and they sent a special tactical team from Washington D.C. Four of these agents came in as the people from Masjid al-Haqq were laying on the ground. The informant had dismissed himself and three of the other brothers and Imam Luqman laid down on the ground, this was caught on surveillance camera footage from the warehouse.

The agents let a dog loose and the dog attacked Imam Luqman as he was laying on the ground and then they shot him twenty times including once in the back, and he died that day. The FBI dog named Freddy was shot and keep in mind they have the Joint Terrorism Task Force who is there with helicopters and they flew the dog to the veterinarian hospital and they never even called an ambulance for the Imam.

Can you talk about what some of the media response’s were immediately following his murder?

The media immediately took the claims of the FBI that were in the affidavit, and didn’t even call Imam Luqman an alleged criminal, they immediately started calling him a radical Imam, who was part of an extremist mosque. The criminal affidavit claimed that he and his congregation were holding stolen merchandise so that they could sell it to make the neighborhood under Sharia, so they played that card as if he was a terrorist trying to bring Islamic law to the community.

Since 9/11 we know that at minimum there have been at least 10,000 paid infiltrators and informants planted in the Muslim community throughout the United States, can you talk a bit about the larger context of infiltration in the Muslim community over the last thirteen years?

In terms of infiltration it’s really interesting that when you read the criminal affidavit it seems like the mentality of the FBI is driven by something bigger then just 9/11. The reason why I say that is because the criminal affidavit mentioned the name of Imam Jamil al-Amin aka H. Rap Brown. They mentioned him as being a so called ‘black radical’ who had been involved with the Black Panther Party going back to the old days of 1960s and early 1970s and they call him a cop killer. Imam Jamil who was himself a target of COINTELPRO, the FBI’s counterintelligence program, under J. Edgar Hoover. From the Nation of Islam to Malcolm X when he left the nation, to Imam Jamil al-Amin they all had been infiltrated and had informants with them going back into the 60s.

So, as much as Imam Luqman’s mosque had been infiltrated and we have this whole cover of 9/11 and mosque infiltration, I really look at it as more than that. In reality he as a target was really part of COINTELPRO 2.0 and his relationship with Imam Jamil, may God preserve him and grant him justice, was also a major reason why he was targeted.

Can you talk about the different responses within the Muslim community to the Murder of Imam Luqman, and also how the local community has responded in Detroit?

I will sum it up in three parts. First, the Muslim community who is Black American, but also some of those that live in the poorer areas of Detroit, Muslims who are Yemeni and Bengali. People knew Imam Luqman, and people thought that it was fishy to say that he was murdered in the very beginning. There were protests outside the federal building. We had a town hall meeting at this place called the Muslim center in Detroit. Then when his funeral prayer came there was a bus that came from New York with Imam Talib Abdul-Rashid, and Imam Siraj Wahaj. People came from throughout the area and his janazah (funeral prayer) had well over 2000 people, the overwhelming majority of who were Black with some Arabs, and some Bengalis,

The second response was, those in suburban Detroit communities and in Dearborn, the Lebanese and the Iraqi communities they were trying to distance themselves from Imam Luqman, because Imam Luqman was killed in Dearborn, even though he lived in Detroit. The Friday after he was killed, I received a call from one congregation, and they told me that one of the popular Imam’s in Dearborn said that Imam Luqman was not a Shaykh (religious leader/ scholar) he was a criminal. There was another community activist in Dearborn who was quoted in the New York Times as saying that ‘well Christians have people like the KKK and we have fringe people like this. Immediately, a lot of them believed exactly what the government said whereas other people across America who have been entrapped by federal law enforcement, those people were given the benefit of the doubt. So there is clearly racism involved with this, there is no doubt about it.

The third, is people in the Black community who are not Muslim, we have received a lot of support from them. As things went along and we were pressing for more answers we got a lot of support from people like: Congressmen John Conyers, the Detroit board of police commissioners, the local NAACP, the local chapter of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the Detroit coalition against police brutality, attorney’s in the national lawyers guild, we had all these people in our coalition calling for an independent investigation regarding Imam Luqman’s death. Actually, some of the people in the Black community who aren’t Muslim were invoking history and the counterintelligence program that took place. Many of those people who knew Imam Luqman they spoke publicly, testifying to his good character. Those were the three basic responses I saw within the Muslim community as well as within the African American community. I could enter into a fourth category, where we got a lot of hate calls and we got challenged a lot on conservative radio by people in the suburbs who aren’t Muslim, who aren’t African American who basically believed that, ‘this guy was a criminal and an extremist,’ and there was absolutely no sympathy.

What type of political action were you all calling for after his death, and where are things at now?

We called for an independent investigation, and we got a civil rights review form the department of justice civil rights division, which we were skeptical about, and we weren’t very confident in that process from the beginning. Tom Perez, at the time led the civil rights division and he said that there was no wrong doing. The former attorney general Michael Cox, he found no wrongdoing and so there are no criminal charges of any kind. We filed a wrongful death lawsuit against the FBI and the initial filing was dismissed and we are now appealing, and it is going back and forth. We have a signed affidavit from a witness at the warehouse that says that Imam Luqman did not have a gun in his hands. He was trying to fight off the dog that was biting him, I put up the autopsy photos on my blog and you can see the actual bite marks on his face. We believe that the FBI shot their own dog as they shot Imam Luqman, when they gave the autopsy they didn’t do a paraffin test so there is no proof that he had any gun powder on him. The so called gun they said he had, none of his fingerprints were on it, none of his DNA, so there is no forensic evidence to even say that he had a gun. The only people that said he had a gun were the four people that shot and killed him. The shooters the day of the murder, they flew back to DC carrying the alleged gun with them. The Dearborn police came to secure the scene about an hour later and they didn’t give them access to that gun and those four people didn’t even speak to any investigators until nine months after the shooters were all lawyered up and had the exact same lawyer to coordinate their answers. So the whole thing reeks of fraud.

God willing with the appeals process we get some form of justice, we believe that the initial filing was dismissed on a weak claim and we are hoping that this goes to a trial so that it can be made public what the FBI and the Department of Justice actually did. Money is not the object, the family is not even asking for any money or settlement. It’s not a situation where the family is suing for millions of dollars, it’s about getting the truth and what happened out so that we can explore the players who were involved in this with the FBI. We have a picture of one of the informants by the name of Jibril, there were two other people that were infiltrating that mosque that maybe never left the community. Maybe they are floating around right now, all of that needs to be exposed and made public.

Out of everything that has happened over the last thirteen years, I know of only one other case where someone was murdered in the United States by the FBI, and yet still we hear almost nothing about this case on a national level, as we do with the extra judicial killing of other American citizens abroad by the US military for example. There has been very little public advocacy nationally about this case, why do you think that is?

The year after Imam Luqman was killed, the NAACP had their national convening in Kansas City and I was called Hillary Shelton, the President at that time, and they actually made a motion at their convention on the need for a thorough DOJ investigation. We also had support from the ACLU, Muslim Advocates, and a few other organizations. Of course it was nothing like the Michael Brown case, and perhaps with the nature of it being about a Muslim and with the fear of Muslims being fomented in America, perhaps it has chilled or turned off some advocates who would normally be involved in this work. I can only imagine if there was an organizer in the community, even who was Black, Christian or Agnostic and it was done the same way I think you would see a much bigger uprising.

What can we do on this 5th anniversary of his death to remember Imam Luqman?

What I would ask for the community is a couple of things, one that people make du’a (pray) for the soul of Imam Luqman, recite Surah al-Fatiha (the opening chapter of the Qur’an) on his behalf, ask for his forgiveness and that Allah accepts him as a shahid (martyr) and also pray for his family, of course this totally disrupted his family unit. His wife who was widowed, was deported back to Tanzania, and she is really struggling, this is another untold part of this story. They arrested her and she didn’t have citizenship yet so they deported her. Also pray that we can have some success in terms of this appeal. The second thing we would ask for is people to give to CAIR Michigan on our website at cairmichigan.org — we have been working on this case for years and we have racked up a lot of legal expenses during the case and it is still ongoing. From everything from filing motions to detaining Cyril Wick who is a class A top forensic pathologist who reviewed the autopsy photos and the different reports and everything, this has cost us a lot of money and expenses, so those are the two things that we would ask for.

For more stories from Ummah Wide click our Logo below

Sign up for our Weekly Email Newsletter Here

Follow Ummah Wide: Twitter | Facebook | Instagram | Linkedin | Soundcloud