From bookish boy to focus of intensive manhunt
A few sprints toward the metal goalposts and he would start wheezing, leaving him groping for the inhaler that became his lifelong companion. Slightly built, he was bookish, a champion of Quran memorization contests, the son of a pioneering Guyanese holy man who was the first westerner to graduate from Medina's prestigious Islamic University.
El'Shukri-Jumah's weakened lungs soon sent him indoors to his much-thumbed copy of the Quran and his stacks of videotaped movies. The films were always U.S. pyrotechnic action flicks like "The Terminator," or "anything with Sylvester Stallone," said his younger brother Nabil. He wore a "Miami Vice" T-shirt; he longed to travel to the United States.
The image of the frail child fascinated by U.S. culture is difficult to reconcile with the description of El'Shukri-Jumah broadcast around the world last month, when authorities launched an intensive manhunt for him.
The FBI has labeled El'Shukri-Jumah one of the five most dangerous fugitive terrorist suspects in the world and the most serious terrorism threat to the United States.
Federal law-enforcement sources have compared his organizational skills to those of Mohamed Atta, the leader of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Law-enforcement sources believe El'Shukri-Jumah has gained widespread notoriety in terrorist circles, assuming the moniker "Ja'far the Pilot" because of an apparent interest in aviation.
"The connections that this individual had to known al-Qaida members, including senior al-Qaida officials, is of very great concern to us," said Pasquale D'Amuro, head of counterterrorism at the FBI.
Itinerant life
El'Shukri-Jumah, now 27, didn't attract the attention of the FBI until long after he and his family moved to the United States. Before then, the family had quietly hopscotched back and forth across the Atlantic, following El'Shukri-Jumah's father, Gulshair, as he pursued an itinerant life as a student, missionary and mosque leader in Guyana, Trinidad and Saudi Arabia.
The eldest of five children, Adnan El'Shukri-Jumah was born in 1975 in Saudi Arabia, to his Guyanese father and a Saudi mother. After years of frequently uprooting his family, the elder El'Shukri-Jumah decided to leave them in Saudi Arabia while he worked as a missionary in Trinidad and New York, seeing them only during twice-yearly visits for more than a decade from the early 1980s to the mid-1990s.
Adnan El'Shukri-Jumah was expected to share responsibility for the household with his mother during his father's extended absences. Federal investigators believe he may have become radicalized during this period.
One of the young men El'Shukri-Jumah may have met while in South Florida was Jose Padilla, who is now held as an enemy combatant and is accused of plotting to detonate a radioactive "dirty" bomb in the United States.
Raed Awad, a fund-raiser for the Holy Land Foundation, a Muslim charity whose assets have been frozen in the government's war on terrorism, told the Miami Herald that El'Shukri-Jumah and Padilla became acquainted at a mosque in Sunrise, Fla.
Gulshair El'Shukri-Jumah doesn't recall any contact between his son and Padilla. But he said that he counseled Padilla's wife about their divorce in the mid-1990s.
The FBI believes that Padilla is one of four key al-Qaida players, all now in U.S. custody, with whom El'Shukri-Jumah conferred overseas. The others are Ramzi Binalshibh, a key coordinator of the Sept. 11 attacks; field commander Abu Zubaida; and al-Qaida operations chief Khalid Shaikh Mohammed.
Mysterious figure
The trail to El'Shukri-Jumah began in U.S. detainment camps for alleged al-Qaida fighters in Afghanistan and Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Last year, detainees began telling interrogators about a mysterious figure who had gone through terror training and was a leading candidate to organize a terror operation in the United States.
The man was fluent in English and familiar with the United States. He was comfortable with explosives and electronics, according to some accounts. He was known by his "war name," Abu Arif, or by another alias, Ja'far al-Tayar, or Ja'far the Pilot.
An alert was issued in February for a Pakistani who turned out to be the wrong man. Later, after Mohammed, the al-Qaida lieutenant, was captured during a raid in Pakistan, U.S. officials showed him a photograph of El'Shukri-Jumah. He surprised investigators by saying "That is Ja'far," according to a senior U.S. official.
U.S. authorities believe El'Shukri-Jumah attended an al-Qaida explosives-training camp in 2000, a claim denied by his family. Investigators also have uncovered an al-Qaida-linked document that connects Ja'far's name to Norman, Okla., where accused Sept. 11 conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui received flight training. There is, however, no evidence that El'Shukri-Jumah attended flight school in the United States.
Worldwide alert issued
The identification by Mohammed, along with the other evidence, prompted the FBI to issue the unusually urgent worldwide alert for El'Shukri-Jumah on March 20. Agents are particularly concerned about attacks on "soft targets," such as apartment buildings and hotels.
The FBI alert for El'Shukri-Jumah was issued at least two years after the agency became aware of him, when he was identified as a suspected bit player in a separate terrorism case.
The plot's leader, Imran Mandhai, is serving an 11-year prison sentence after pleading guilty to conspiracy after his arrest on charges of planning a "jihad cell" of as many as 30 men that would target electrical substations, an armory, Jewish institutions and Mount Rushmore.
In spring 2001, El'Shukri-Jumah rebuffed FBI attempts to recruit him as an informant, according to a law-enforcement source. His parents say he left the country not long afterward, in May 2001, and the FBI believes he hasn't been back since. El'Shukri-Jumah's family said he went to the Caribbean to sell Muslim goods.
"He didn't like to stay in one place," his mother said.
There hasn't been much contact since he left. The FBI wanted to see the one letter he sent home since leaving, but his mother said she couldn't find it.
All she could tell them was that her son had called five months ago. Her husband was napping, so she grabbed the phone. Adnan was calling to say he had moved to Morocco, married and had a son.
She had just once piece of advice for him: "Don't come back."