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DEA AGENT TESTIFIES: Suspect in Terror Case Had Scores of False IDs

Saturday, April 5, 2003
By David Shepardson
Detroit News Staff

Elmardoudi is charged along with Karim Koubriti, Ahmed Hannan and Farouk Ali-Haimoud with conspiracy to provide material support to terrorists, stemming from a Sept. 17, 2001, raid of an apartment in southwest Detroit in which Joint Terrorism Task Force agents went to look for Nabil al-Marabh, a man high on the FBI's terror watch list. For more than year, Elmardoudi was referred to as Abdella LNU -- or last name unknown -- by the government.

DETROIT -- TDN
The November 2002 arrest of a mysterious suspect in the Detroit terror case who eluded authorities for more than 13 months may have been the result of a bad choice of seats on a bus bound for Texas.

Abdel-Ilah Elmardoudi, 37, was arrested Nov. 4 in Greensboro, N.C., on a Greyhound bus headed for Houston from New York. He was wearing a hairpiece to conceal his appearance and had $83,020 in cash along with scores of false IDs, passports and other government documents, federal agents said.

Elmardoudi also had a computer scanner and a postcard of the World Trade Center and another of the memorial of lights at the World Trade Center site, the investigators said.

Drug Enforcement Administration Special Agent Stephen Razik was part of a three-agent sweep of the bus searching for illegal drugs. Kneeling in a vacant seat in the front row of the bus, he struck up a casual conversation with Elmardoudi, who was sitting in the second row.
(More: DetNews.com)
2003 © The Detroit News

Dan