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The group predated Mohamed’s arrival. Its informal leader was a naturalized American citizen from Egypt named El Sayyid Nosair. After earning his degree in industrial design and engineering from Helwan University in Egypt, Nosair’s life had become tumultuous. He had dabbled with terrorism, reportedly training under the infamous Abu Nidal.

Not long afterward, in 1981, he moved to the United States, settled in Pittsburgh, and married an Irish American convert to Islam. Nosair lived a short walk from the University of Pittsburgh in a mildly seedy neighborhood with a handful of cockroach-infested bars and low-end strip clubs but relatively safe streets.41

His time in Pittsburgh was troubled. He was badly injured while working as an electrician, and he was eventually fired from his job after trying to convert his coworkers to Islam on company time. Allegations of sexual assault dogged him. Seeking a clean start, he packed up his wife and children and moved to Jersey City, where he found a job working at a power plant and began to attend the Masjid As-Salaam.

Around the same time he discovered the Al Kifah Center. Like so many others, he was drawn in by the powerful charisma of Abdullah Azzam. He began to spend more and more time at the center.

Family and health considerations prevented him from going to Afghanistan, but he began to organize an informal training program for those who might succeed where he could not.

It was Nosair’s poster that had been spotted at As-Salaam by Khaled Ibrahim. A small group with a rotating membership of about six to twelve local Muslims began to practice shooting at a gun club in Calverton, New Jersey. Initially they were coached by an African American Muslim from Brooklyn, an ex-marine suspected of being involved in a series of bank robberies. His name is unknown because he was never charged, and the case remains open.42

The Brooklyn fighter, Abdullah Rashid, who had by now mostly recovered from nearly losing his leg in Afghanistan, joined the group. Hoping to prevent future jihadists from suffering premature injuries like his own, he had become a zealous advocate of training.43

Two other African American Muslims took part in the training, along with recent Palestinian immigrant Mohammed Salameh and Egyptian immigrant Mahmud Abouhalima, who had come to the United States a few years earlier. Both men would later be implicated in the World Trade Center bombing.

Members of the group came and went over time. Authorities suspected at one point that Wadih El Hage had trained with the men but never proved it; however, El Hage did once sell a gun to Abouhalima.44 The target-practice sessions in Calverton were frequent but irregular. The men sometimes brought their children along. Nosair’s son, Zak Ebrahim, remembered one trip to the shooting range when he was only six years old:

My father seemed to be having almost as much fun as I was, if not more. Using a fully automatic weapon, he shot the legs out from under one of the larger targets. The men all shot it and had a laugh. Trying to emulate him on the next turn, I held the trigger back on a fully automatic rifle. I fired one bullet after another in quick succession. [ … ]

Besides the five or six men, there were just as many of their kids waiting to take their turn. By late morning, it began to softly drizzle and I knew our time at the range was coming to an end. On what I figured would be my last turn at shooting, I took aim at my target and let each bullet fly. The last one hit the small orange light that sat on top of the target, and to everyone’s surprise, especially mine, the entire target exploded, black smoke billowing into the sky.

My uncle turned to the rest of the men and in Arabic said ibn abu, which means, “Like father, like son.” They all seemed to get a very good laugh out of that comment. It wasn’t until a few years later that I fully understand, understood what they thought was so funny. They thought they saw in me the same destruction my father was capable