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Meanwhile, U.S. officials took consolation from the arrest in London of Abu Hamza al-Masri, the outspoken one-eyed cleric who once preached at the city's radical Finsbury Park Mosque, where the likes of so-called shoe bomber Richard Reid and al-Qaeda operative Zacarias Moussaoui worshipped. Abu Hamza has long been suspected of having ties to terrorism, but British authorities took him in only after U.S. investigators got Muslim convert James Ujaama to testify in Seattle that he had communicated with the cleric about plans to build a terrorism training camp in Bly, Ore., in 1999. In a bargain with prosecutors, Ujaama in mid-April pleaded guilty to one count of conspiring to help the Taliban. Besides the training-camp plan, Abu Hamza was charged in the U.S. with aiding a deadly kidnapping plot in Yemen in 1998 and supporting Taliban and al-Qaeda--training operations in Afghanistan. British officials indicate they are willing to hand him over to the U.S. as long as the U.S. agrees not to seek the death penalty in the case. Abu Hamza is fighting extradition.
While the Ashcroft press conference sparked thousands of calls to FBI and police offices from tipsters who thought they had spotted the suspects whom some officials have sarcastically dubbed the Magnificent Seven, Adam Gadahn's relatives say they haven't seen him since 1998 or even heard from him since he called almost two years ago from Pakistan. He said that he was married to an Afghan refugee there and that they had a child. A bookworm who eagerly read about religion and history as a teenager, Gadahn got an early introduction to Islam, courtesy of his dad's goat-farming business, which mainly sold to an Islamic market in downtown Los Angeles. In an online posting apparently written by Gadahn in 1995, he says that from an early age, he "knew well that [Muslims] were not the bloodthirsty, barbaric terrorists that the news media and the televangelists paint them to be."
Before he rejected his parents' nondenominational brand of Christianity and found Islam, teaching himself Arabic in the process, Gadahn had other passions. For a brief spell in the early 1990s, he became a big fan of so-called death-metal music, contributing reviews of bands with names like Damnation and Autopsy to a fanzine. After he embraced Islam, he went to work as a security guard at an Orange County mosque. But he fell asleep on the job and was fired, then started a fistfight with one of the mosque's elders and was convicted of assault. Gadahn served two days in jail but failed to turn up for five days of community service. That was the last chapter of the young man's public life until John Ashcroft put his name in the spotlight. --Reported by Elaine Shannon, Viveca Novak and John F. Dickerson/Washington; Bruce Crumley/Paris; J.F.O. McAllister/London; and Jeffrey Ressner/Los Angeles, with other bureaus