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Years later, when I was in London, investigating the al-Qaeda cell there as part of Operation Challenge, we were going through files belonging to Fawwaz and other cell members in London, and I read a lab report from Austria identifying the substance as osmium.

Born in Egypt in 1935 and married to an American, Dr. Rashad Khalifa was a liberal imam in Tucson, Arizona. He had moved to the United States in the late 1950s; his son Sam Khalifa went on to play shortstop for the Pittsburgh Pirates in the early to mid-1980s. A biochemist, Khalifa imputed properties to numbers, believing that they determined events in life, and even alleged that the miracles of the Quran were revealed through mathematical equations. He allowed male and female congregants to pray together in his mosque, Masjid Tucson, and didn’t demand that they wear traditional Muslim dress, even for prayers. Khalifa also publicly opposed radical takfiri ideas that others in the local Muslim community—especially radical Egyptians—espoused, such as labeling fellow adherents of Islam who didn’t accept their views as kafirs, or nonbelievers.

A rival Tucson mosque, the Islamic Center, situated about ten miles from Masjid Tucson, served the more radical members of the local Muslim community, including Wadih el-Hage. The Islamic Center’s congregants often discussed Khalifa and their displeasure with what he was preaching. By the late 1980s, their complaints about the imam had reached other radical communities across the United States.

On a Friday in January 1990, el-Hage received a call from a man who said that he was a visitor from New York and that he was waiting at the Islamic Center to see him. They met at the mosque; el-Hage later described the man vaguely and unhelpfully as a tall Egyptian who wore glasses and had a long beard. The man told el-Hage that he was visiting Tucson to investigate Rashad Khalifa. “I’ve heard that his teachings contradict what all Muslims agree on,” the man told el-Hage. He spoke of Khalifa’s willingness to allow men and women to pray together, and of his theories about numbers in the Quran. Scientific American had called Khalifa’s well-received annotated translation of the Quran, published under the title Quran: The Final Testament, “an ingenious study,” which did nothing to address his critics’ objections. El-Hage invited the visitor back to his house for lunch.

During the meal, the visitor raged against Khalifa. He told el-Hage that he had tried to go to Masjid Tucson to pray but hadn’t been allowed in because of his long beard. Peering through a window of the mosque, he had seen men and women worshipping together and had grown even angrier. According to el-Hage, the visitor simply left after this catalogue of grievances.

Later that month, Dr. Khalifa was found murdered in the kitchen of his mosque. Wadih el-Hage later said he felt that Khalifa’s killing was justified. The murder remains unsolved.

On November 5, 1990, Meir Kahane, a right-wing American Israeli rabbi and onetime member of the Israeli parliament, was giving a speech at a Marriott hotel in New York City. When he finished, members of the audience gathered around him to congratulate him. A gun was fired, and the bullet hit Kahane in the neck, killing him. While trying to escape, El Sayyid Nosair, an Egyptian who had immigrated to the United States in 1981, was wounded in a shootout and apprehended.

A subsequent investigation found that an Egyptian named Mahmud Abouhalima had provided Nosair’s gun and additional weapons for the attack. The weapons allegedly had been bought for Abouhalima by el-Hage, whom he had met at an Islamic conference in the United States in 1989. Nosair was a member of the group of radical Islamists in New York led by the Blind Sheik, Sheikh Omar Abdul Rahman.

Abdul Rahman, having mastered the Quran in Braille, had gone on to study at Cairo’s prestigious al-Azhar University. He had been arrested by the Egyptian regime in connection with the assassination of Sadat—accused, among