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Last week Sheik Omar turned up in a Detroit neighborhood with a troublesome entourage of about 50 supporters. When the group paid an uninvited visit to a mosque in Dearborn, Michigan, on Thursday night as Ramadan prayers were beginning, the imam Mohammed Mussa tried to refuse them entry. Sheik Omar came in anyway, saying, "We have to tell the truth, and this mosque is not the place for the truth." As the imam started to pray, Sheik Omar continued to speak, disrupting the service for an hour. Imam Mussa later professed to be unperturbed by the interruption. "They are not educated people," he said. In fact, Sheik Omar holds a doctorate in Islamic jurisprudence from Cairo's Al- Azhar University.
Sheik Omar's name has been on the State Department's list of suspected terrorists since before the assassination of Sadat. FBI officials disclosed last week that agents have been monitoring the cleric and some of his followers in Brooklyn and Jersey City for months, but have picked up no indications that any kind of attack was being planned. Al-Salam Mosque came under scrutiny during Operation Desert Storm, as part of the FBI's stepped-up watch of potentially violent Middle Easterners. Agents were assigned to observe the mosque and some of its adherents, says William Baker, an assistant FBI director at the time, because "that was one of the hot spots in New Jersey. Our strategy was to get a closer handle on Muslim terrorist infrastructures." But agents never determined that criminal activity was being plotted there, so they did not watch it round-the-clock nor seek court orders for wiretaps and bugs. While the FBI did not gather enough information to brand Salameh a potential bomber, he was listed on a terrorist data base containing 185,000 names.
Although Sheik Omar has not lived in his native land since 1990, he is still of acute interest to Egyptian authorities. The group that recognizes him as its spiritual leader, Al Jama'a al Islamiyya, attracts support from as many as 200,000 Egyptians. Officials charge that the sheik tapes messages of sedition on cassettes that he smuggles abroad for circulation in Egypt and for broadcast on a Lebanese radio station controlled by the Iranian-backed Hizballah. The tapes, say Egyptian authorities, are plainly intended to foment violence: his pronouncements incite attacks on Egyptian officials, Christian Copts and tourists. There has been unsubstantiated talk that he receives financial support from the Islamic states of Iran and Sudan.