Hamin Rashada, senior life coach at the Orange County Transition Center, has been speaking about one of his charges, Laguerre Payen, who was one of four men arrested for plotting to bomb two synagogues and shoot down an American military aircraft.
“He’s a strange kid,” Rashada said. “He had a lot of psychological problems.”
Rashada is a senior life coach with the program and was working with Payen. He also encouraged him to attend Friday prayers at Masjid al-Ikhlas in Newburgh where Rashada is an assistan imam. Payen had told him he was Muslim, and Rashada figured he must have been introduced to Islam in prison. Misunderstandings of the teachings can occur in places such as prison, Rashada said, because educated teachers may be rarer. Rashada said at the Newburgh mosque, they worked to put teachings in their proper context. Payen attended only occasionally, however, he said.
“I guess when he got bored out here on the street,” Rashada said.
When Payen did come, he would try to impress other members of the mosque by spouting supposed knowledge of Islam, Rashada said. Often, he was so far off in his statements Rashada would have to correct him in front of people. Payen would go quiet then and wander off. He seemed passive to Rashada. Strange, yes, but never violent.
He continues.
Rashada said he didn’t know either Williams, and Cromitie’s [other suspects] name was only vaguely familiar. (“I can’t put a face with a name.”) He knew Payen best through the Transition Center. He could picture how all the sudden attention would go as people rushed to find a link from the suspects to a mosque and extremist Islam. It upset him.
“It’s disgustingly irresponsible,” he said.He quoted a teaching for the Koran that says a person who saves on person saves all of humanity. And a person who kills another person kills all of humanity. He said they teach that at the mosque. Payen, he said, rarely attended.
UPDATE:
Back in February Raffaello Pantucci of IISS wrote a CIF piece on the topic of radicalisation and the growth of Muslim gangs in British prison. Read it here.
UPDATE 2:
And the ringleader got stoned in preparation for the big event.
2 Comments
Holy shit, that’s some serious firepower for anyone let alone a group of pot-smoking nascent- jihadis.
I dunno, if anybody’s going to be trying to get their hands on anti-aircraft missiles I’d rather it’s a terrorist outfit led by a man too stoned to check whether their weapons man might be with the FBI. The whole trying-to-blow-up-synagogues/aircraft thing was pretty evil, but otherwise these guys are laughable/pathetic.
I particularly liked these details:
They really make terrorism look hard.