CLERK RINGS UP N.J. JIHAD JERKS
By JANA WINTER Post Correspondent
May 13, 2007 -- MOUNT LAUREL, N.J. - It all began on a frigid January day with 10 bearded Muslim men huddled in the parking lot of a Circuit City debating who would go inside to have a copy made of a tape showing them firing guns and praising jihad.
Eventually, the group - who'd been seen standing outside earlier that January 2006 week - selected two men to go inside while the rest waited in the parking lot, an employee who was outside smoking at the time recalled.
Once inside, the two men approached the television section of the electronics store where videos could be transferred to DVD and copies could be made.
They handed the teenage clerk a mini-cassette tape from a camcorder and asked for a $20 transfer to be made to DVD. As they waited, the two men calmly walked around the store looking at televisions, video games and DVDs.
What they didn't know was that they had sealed their ultimate fate.
When the teen and another employee went into a back room and began the conversion of the tape, they saw a group of bearded men wearing "fundamentalist attire" and shooting "big, f-ing guns," the teen later told co-workers.
Throughout the 90-minute-long tape, above the booming gunfire at a Pennsylvania target range, the jihadists could be heard screaming "God is great!"
The two employees "freaked out," their co-worker recalled.
At first, the teenage clerk didn't know what to do, his pal said.
"Dude, I just saw some really weird s-," he frantically told his co-worker. "I don't know what to do. Should I call someone or is that being racist?" The fellow employee tried to calm his friend and told him that if what he saw terrified him so much, he should tell the police.
The teen first consulted with a manager before making the 911 call.
FBI agents got a copy of the tape from Circuit City, and went to the teen's house and interviewed him at length.
That call to authorities set in motion a 16-month undercover investigation in which six of the men caught on tape chillingly discussing killing soldiers "in the name of Allah."
As the FBI continued its investigation, the clerk - who has not been identified - quietly went about his life, his co-workers said.
Then when news broke on Tuesday that federal authorities had arrested six foreign-born Muslims in the terror plot, the frightened teen decided to lay low - not coming to work or going to school until the situation blew over, his pals said.
He was too terrified of reprisals to be interviewed by The Post yesterday.
Authorities have charged five of the six men, Mohamad Shnewer, 22, Serdar Tatar, 23, and brothers Dritan Duka, 28, Shain Duka, 26, and Eljvir Duka 23, with conspiring to murder U.S. military personnel. A sixth man, Agron Abdullahu, 24, was charged with aiding and abetting the others.
Federal officials have hailed the quick-thinking clerk as a hero, describing his decision to alert them to the troubling video as the key to nixing the Fort Dix Six's plan to bring jihad to the New Jersey Army base and kill as many soldiers as possible.
The feds, still investigating the plot, have said 10 men appeared on the firing-range DVD but that the six arrested men are the core group.
They were arrested late Monday after Dritan and Shain Duka met with an undercover FBI informant in a bid to buy AK-47s and M-16 machine guns.
During the investigation, authorities - relying on conversations taped with paid informants who had infiltrated the group - determined the men had procured detailed maps of Fort Dix, and had scouted out several other military installations.
The men, all immigrants who had gone to schools in working-class suburbs of Philadelphia before embracing extreme Islam, also were taped discussing dying for one's religion and watching several jihadist videos including some featuring al Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden.
Authorities believe the men were in the last stage of planning the attack.
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