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On May 27, 2009, a white van filled with gunmen and C4 explosives arrived at the intelligence services headquarters in Lahore, Pakistan. A minute later, the bomb detonated, flattening two buildings. More than 300 people were injured and 30 or more died.

(K.M. Chaudary/The Associated Press)

The van idled, heavy with rifle-slung men and hundreds of pounds of high-intensity explosives.

On one side of the lane stood dark brick police and rescue buildings, on the other, the salmon-pink headquarters of one of the world's top intelligence agencies. Pedestrians and bicyclists passed with none of the urgency that was to come.

When the light turned, the van inched forward. It snaked left and right between staggered rows of concrete security barricades.

Then it stopped.

As security guards stepped toward the driver, the passenger and side doors opened.

A minute later on that sunny May morning in 2009, white smoke mushroomed over the skyline of Lahore, Pakistan.

Ali Jaleel, 29, participated in a suicide attack that killed dozens in Pakistan. Portlander Reaz Qadir Khan, now 49, is accused of helping him.

The heart of the Inter-Services Intelligence agency was pierced by the most efficient explosion to hit Pakistan's Punjab state before or since. Security footage documents every second that led to the carnage.

U.S. prosecutors say partial blame for the blast rests with a man living 13 time zones away, in a Southwest Portland apartment: Reaz Qadir Khan. The 49-year-old sewage plant worker is accused of financing terror training for an occupant of the bomb-laden van that day and helping his family afterward.

Prosecutors won't say when they think Khan grew close to Ali Jaleel, a native of the Maldive Islands more than a decade Khan's junior. But the answer is likely to be found somewhere during Jaleel's 14-year relationship with the land of Khan's birth, Pakistan.

Bomb plot in Lahore

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Khan immigrated to the United States in 1988, but his wife has traveled to Pakistan since, Khan said recently in court. The couple still hold a bank account there. Jaleel left home for a Pakistani madrassa as a teenager and returned to the country repeatedly.

For clues to why a Portland city worker may have become enmeshed, as prosecutors say he did, in a deadly bomb plot, scour the past of the man he is accused of helping.

How could $3,200, the seemingly small sum Khan is accused of sending, become essential in Jaleel's final voyage to Khan's native country?

Start with Ali Jaleel's departure from the tiny island where he was raised and the global forces that propelled him to Pakistan.

Behind the blue doors

The youngest in a family of four girls and four boys, Ali Jaleel was born 15 years after Khan on Dec. 21, 1979.

According to older brother Ibrahim, Ali was sweet-tempered, the favorite. His funny stories charmed his elders. In his teens he kicked soccer balls at the sports complex near the family home in Malé, the capital of the Maldives.

The legend

Seemingly afloat in the Indian Ocean, the city's crammed network of high-rises and concrete sea walls would fill an area smaller than Portland's Interstate 5/I-405 loop.

The rest of the former British protectorate's 1,200 tropical islands are layered in white sand and palm trees. Malé is fully urbanized, complete with disdainful cab drivers, biometric security at government offices, motor bikes, graffiti and satellite dishes pointing north to capture Indian cable television. The only beach on Malé is, incongruously, manmade.

Street addresses do not exist: only house names, painted on metal signs above entryways. Broken Heart. Heaven. Paris Villa. Many women wear hijabs. Maldivians call it fashion, but the head scarves also reflects the recent influence of Middle Eastern conservatism.

The Jaleel family lives in H. Moscowge, a sprawling complex of apartments surrounding a courtyard and passed down through generations. An extended list of cousins shared the home with Ali Jaleel behind two dark blue front doors.

Gayoom’s rule

Jaleel was raised during the 30-year reign of a president who firmly established the Maldives as a destination for luxury island tourism. Maumoon Abdul Gayoom's government espoused a moderate version of Sunni Islam that wouldn't scare away Westerners.

Ali's father, a former police officer who also worked as a radio announcer and screen actor, followed the Islam of state-run mosques.

Ali's mother and three siblings, meanwhile, gravitated toward more rigid beliefs.

Older brother Ahmed grew a beard. Two sisters were often arrested for wearing hijabs and holding prayers at home.

Ali's closest relationship was with his most Westernized sibling, Ibrahim, also known as Jalla. Nine years Ali's senior, Jalla listened to American music and adored Hollywood blockbusters. He starred on the national volleyball team and traveled for the sport.

Ali shadowed Jalla like a boxer. "He wanted to be like me when he grew up," Jalla said.

Ali was a mediocre student, Jalla recalls, but his English and Arabic were good. He was disciplined, and his equanimity drew older relatives to seek his counsel in religious disputes. By the time he finished prestigious Majeediyya high school -- officials put the date around 1995, when he was 15 -- Ali was popular, poised. The only question was where he would turn next.

Respect. Learn. Behave

The answer was a religious school in Pakistan.

The madrassa drive

In Faisalabad, Pakistan, the Jamia Salafia seminary drew noteworthy students in the 1990s. Pakistani Abdul Malik later ran a training camp for militants in Kashmir. Maldivian Ibrahim Fauzee, who also married Jaleel's young niece, was arrested after 9/11, shipped to Guantanamo and released in 2005.

Ali Jaleel arrived at the school in 1995, trading a hometown of 62,500 for a metropolis of 1.8 million.

The madrassa drive

Ordinary Maldivians had few choices to educate their children beyond the 10th grade until the late 1970s, when Pakistan and India started to offer them postsecondary education.

"It was very cheap. Pakistan said, 'Give us your kids, we will teach them the Quran,'" Masood Imad, spokesman for the Maldives government, said of the "madrassa drive."

Ali's brother Ahmed, a year younger than Portlander Reaz Khan, enrolled in Jamia Salafia in 1978 when Khan was a teenager in Pakistan. Two of Jaleel's sisters, Fathimath and Aishath, married madrassa students and emigrated to be with them.

Ali, born the year after Ahmed started at Jamia Salafia, followed him when the time came.

At Jamia Salafia

Ali lived with his married sisters. His brother Jalla sent money to help with school expenses, including Ali's ticket back to the Maldives after his first school term.

The teenager fell ill during the visit. "The whole night I stayed with him, putting a wet cloth on his head," Jalla remembers. When he was well, Ali memorized the Quran and studied Islamic law. He teased Jalla, telling him to give up secular ways. Jalla's response was good-natured: "I asked him to live a normal life."

Ali's next visit home, a year later, was different.

Bearded and wearing salwars, long shirts popular in Pakistan, Ali was righteous and distant. He married a Malé woman without inviting Jalla. The snub stung. Jalla stopped sending Ali money and ignored his letters. Their rift spanned several years.

Jalla heard news of his brother through relatives and friends. While Reaz Khan was working at companies in Southern California and starting a family, Ali Jaleel was in Pakistan. He wrapped up his studies at the madrassa in 1998. He brought his new wife to Pakistan. He became a father. He spent time on the Afghan border. His life sounded like a whirlwind.

An adolescent Ali Jaleel.

Ali and Jalla met up next after Sept. 11, 2001, when travel restrictions forced Jaleel back home.

The brothers mended their relationship. But the smiling Ali, who turned 22 that year, no longer wanted to be a sports hero. He spoke of emigrating to Yemen and being a messenger for Allah. Biological evolution, poetry, volleyball: All were irrelevant.

All that mattered, he told Jalla, was jihad.

"He had been brainwashed," Jalla said. "He thought jihad was the best way to meet God."

Gathering followers

As the brothers grew apart, Ali Jaleel cultivated new relationships. Some associates recall what he said about his evolving ideology.

Outside of Jamia Salafia, Ali described ongoing studies under clerics beyond the school's walls further and further right on the Islamic continuum.

A preacher’s words

He ultimately was drawn to a foreign cleric named Abu Issa Muhammad Al Rifaee, who said democracies were illegitimate and Muslim nations should unite under one leader.

Jaleel set out to enlist others, targeting girls, dropouts smoking hashish on the street, and popular students whose conversion might sway classmates.

Two associates — a friend from 1998 to 2003, and a follower from 2002 to 2004 — described the recruiting. The two, teens when Jaleel met them, requested anonymity for fear of government reprisal.

"He was charismatic," said one. "If someone needed some help, he was there."

The other said he pledged allegiance to Jaleel, explaining it this way: "We were obliged to do whatever he says as long as we are not doing it against Islam."

Blogger Yameen Rasheed was aware of Jaleel's interactions with island teens.

He "would give them a sense of purpose," Rasheed said.

Jaleel told of training with Kashmiri mujahedeen in martial arts. He said he nearly fell to his death while climbing on the Afghan border. He distributed videos of a guerrilla attack on American troops in Afghanistan. The mix of propaganda and firsthand accounts helped draw new disciples to his cause.

An exorcism

His friends said he earned a living repairing air conditioners, working at a photo shop and performing a peculiar religious specialty: exorcisms and blessings to ward off evil spirits. Somehow he always seemed to have cash.

"He had U.S. dollars," said one former follower. "A lot."

Eventually, several members of Jaleel's group reported his recruitment activity to the national security services. According to a former service member, Jaleel was under frequent surveillance after that.

Friends and followers started to fade. One faction threw its allegiance behind a different jihadi leader. Others renounced fundamentalism entirely, becoming active in the country's budding human rights movement.

Sometime in 2004, Jaleel told a friend he was leaving the country with four teenage followers. The plan was to reach the Afghan front lines by way of Pakistan, the friend recalled.

The journey would be perilous. Pakistan's army launched a bloody ground assault in the tribal areas near the Afghan border in March that year. In June, the first known U.S. drone strike within Pakistan's borders killed a tribal leader, although Pakistan initially claimed credit.

Jaleel was on a mission, his friend said, from which he did not expect to return.

Wastewater treatment operator

Reaz Khan was in the midst of a transition of his own.

In June 2004, his résumé shows, the Pakistani-born Khan left his job at Genesis Computer Systems in Anaheim, Calif., where he had worked for six years.

He did not start a new job for 15 months, and by then he had relocated 1,000 miles to the north.

Reaz Qadir Khan is greeted as he returns to his Southwest Portland apartment in March after his release to home confinement.

In September 2005, after 14 years of unbroken employment in engineering and project management in California, Khan took an unpaid internship with the public works department in Clark County and then a city job as a Portland sewage treatment plant worker.

He was far from happy, according to correspondence described in a federal indictment. In December 2005, a month after being hired by Portland, Khan contacted Jaleel.

The younger man's 2004 mission to Afghanistan left one young follower dead and another paralyzed in a gunbattle, according to the former friend who saw him off. But Jaleel made it home alive.

The government's summary of Khan's message quotes him telling Jaleel, 15 years his junior, that everything they used to talk about "now seems like a distant dream." Khan asks Allah's forgiveness for his lax ways and inaction.

The context of the email is puzzling, because details from the two men's backgrounds offer limited opportunities for their paths to have crossed.

When Jaleel was a child in the Maldives during the 1980s, Khan was marrying and attending leading technical universities in Karachi, Pakistan, and Newark, N.J. When Jaleel was an adolescent in Malé during the early 1990s, Khan was starting a career in Southern California. While Jaleel pingponged between the Maldives and Pakistan in the next decade, Khan became a father.

Most of Khan's adult life was planted in the United States. He had arrived in 1988 to study engineering in New Jersey, married and started work in 1990. At some point he became a naturalized U.S. citizen.

Two older Khan siblings also emigrated to work as engineers. Sister Nahid Qadir Egan, who works for the city of Tulsa, told the Tulsa World newspaper after the assassination of Pakistan's Benazir Bhutto in 2007: "I consider myself a practicing Muslim, and I say there shouldn't be any terrorism. That's not what my religion teaches."

Jaleel's wrote of putting action ahead of words.

In January 2006, a month after Khan confided to Jaleel that he was at an impasse "in the matter of knowledge and practice," Jaleel wrote Khan an email.

The Maldivian reminded the older man of what the government describes as past promises the two had made "to seek martyrdom in the name of Allah."

The indictment quotes a passage in which Jaleel seems to recall a face-to-face conversation with Khan. According to the transcript, Jaleel asks: "where are the words you said with tears in your eyes that 'we shall strive until Allah's word is superior or until we perish'??? 'this world is of no use to us so let's sacrifice ourself for the pleasure of Allah in his way'???"

Then, the intercontinental correspondence -- at least in evidence prosecutors have provided -- falls silent. Khan would go on to impress co-workers at the North Columbia Boulevard wastewater plant for his mild manners and the passion he expressed for educating his sons.

Two more years pass before Khan's emails with Jaleel re-emerge in the federal indictment at a key moment in Jaleel's life.

He was ready for his sacrifice.

Follow the bread crumbs

Ali Jaleel was in a hurry.

The young man had festered under house arrest for two years. Months after the emails with Khan about dreams and promises, Sri Lankan authorities arrested Jaleel at an airport there. He was headed for Pakistan with four Maldivians, including two 21-year-old women, intent on training in jihad, according to the Khan indictment.

Jaleel, who was sent home, would later say the plan was not well thought out and failed because he lacked a contact in Pakistan, U.S. prosecutors have said. Maldives officials did not press charges over Jaleel's attempted travel, but he was convicted of illegally performing marriage ceremonies and preaching unsanctioned views of Islam and jihad.

Jaleel’s home

Confined to Moscowge, Jaleel wrote a book in English called "Pen or Sword" that made the case for action over words. Nonetheless, he also wrote 51,000 words in a 10-month period for his blog, a sort of advice column woven with religious musings. Posting as "Mu'sab Sayyid," Jaleel entertained questions ranging from how to handle child custody disputes to which Muslims he looked to for inspiration. Among his heroes: Imam Sayyid Qutb, father of al-Qaida, and Osama bin Laden. The site logged 10,750 hits in a year.

Jaleel's two-year sentence drew to an end in October 2008. The one-party regime that pursued the Jaleels for their religious practices was ending, replaced by a system equally abhorrent to Jaleel: Maldivians were voting in their first democratic presidential election.

Island democracy

Jaleel was eager for a final voyage into Pakistan. On Oct. 10, he told online readers he was finished.

"Brothers and Sisters," he wrote, "This blog will not be updated now." He was sorry for not replying to every commenter. He signed off, "pray for me."

Then, according to U.S. prosecutors, he emailed his correspondent in Portland.

It sounded urgent.

Jaleel told Khan he needed to leave the islands immediately, the indictment says. Jaleel wasn't able to wait for Khan, the indictment states, but would "leave bread crumbs" to follow after he departed for Pakistan.

Khan was ready to help, prosecutors say. The Portland man offered to arrange for money to be sent to Jaleel, who said he would need $2,500 "for everything," according to the indictment. The money was needed, the document says, for immediate admission to a terrorist training camp.

Days later, Jaleel entered Pakistan, where prosecutors say Khan instructed him to pick up cash from an intermediary.

The record of their communications, as presented in the indictment, ends Nov. 5. On Nov. 15, the indictment says, Khan exchanged emails with an associate of Jaleel's about how to arrange travel for Jaleel's two wives. On Nov. 26, someone created an archival version of Jaleel's blog. The site's Web domain eventually went dead.

The "near enemy"

Jaleel found his final calling among followers of an aging Egyptian named Sheikh Issa al-Masri, a major figure in al-Qaida's global war on Western interests. In early 2009, those followers were preparing to mount a brazen attack.

War on Pakistan

Issa had been in Afghanistan in the 1990s as a spiritual adviser in al-Qaida training camps, where he prepared suicide bombers.

Issa's work was described by Syrians arrested as high-value terror suspects in 2000, according to U.S. military files on Guantanamo detainees published by WikiLeaks. There were courses in poisons, disguise and Western lifestyle. Religious training occurred two or three times a week, during which the sheik justified killing nonbelievers. Graduates swore an oath to Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida.

After the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, Issa slipped across the border into Pakistan's tribal areas, where he began to preach a new ideology of jihad.

Al-Qaida's position in Pakistan previously called for war against foreign, non-Muslim troops. Issa's sermons urged action against Western-leaning Muslim governments, which some jihadists dubbed the "near enemy." His many followers made repeated attempts on the life of President Pervez Musharraf.

The ISI offices in Lahore would be the next target.

According to media accounts afterward, the Pakistani plotters who gathered under Issa's banner included a doctor, a chemical engineer and a businessman who committed street crimes to raise money. Jaleel is not mentioned, but his involvement becomes clear in a 10-minute martyr video filmed while planning was underway.

Jaleel is shown training for the operation in an open field. He wears suspenders as he walks toward the camera, a perfect emoticon smile on his round, heavily bearded face.

In a translation of a will posted online later, Jaleel described the anticipation that preceded martyrdom. "(Y)ou would find yourself waiting and wanting ... and here again I find myself waiting each day, when would the death arrive?" Receiving orders to prepare for an attack was, he wrote, the "happiest news of my life."

Jaleel wrote notes to each of his siblings. He asked brother Jalla once again to abandon volleyball and make Islam his focus.

An online photo titled "Abu Mus'ab Sayyid the night before his martyrdom" shows him without the thick beard, wearing a headband and hefting a rifle. His smile beams broader than ever.

One minute to terror

Stopped at the guard shack, one of the gunmen jumped out of the passenger side door, skidded around the front of the van and chased two guards inside.

It was just past 10:24 a.m. on May 27, 2009, the minute when Jaleel's single-mindedness came to fruition.

A man exited the side door of the Toyota HiAce van. Dressed in a light blue salwar, an ammunition belt around his waist and the butt of an assault weapon braced on his shoulder, he moved toward a building housing police rescue operations.

The bombing

A grenade sent a cloud of smoke across the van's hood and over the guard shack's blue and white awning.

A red scooter screeched to a halt; its rider ran for cover. Bystanders dashed for refuge, pounding on the doors of the ISI headquarters. The man who tossed the grenade darted into the intersection, trailed by bullets sparking the pavement at his heels.

The gunman in light blue ran into the grenade's black smoke to bang on the gate's hinge until it gave. He pushed it open. Security officers fired down from a rooftop. Others shot through a gap in a tall black gate. On the street, an officer in blue was trapped in the line of fire.

The officer, hit, silently folded at the waist and tumbled sideways. The white van moved a dozen yards forward with the gunman in light blue running alongside for cover. Then the van braked hard in front of the black gates.

One beat, and the waiting was over. The Toyota erupted.

The force of the blast threw the van back down the lane. Its boom echoed for miles. C4 explosives left a crater 8 feet deep and 20 feet wide and flattened two buildings. It sheared off walls and shattered windows of other structures. Ceilings collapsed in nearby hospital operating rooms, adding to the casualties.

More than 300 people were injured. Four Inter-Services Intelligence officials and 14 police personnel were among 30 or more dead. All told, the casualties exceeded those from any bombing in Punjab province before or since.

Aftermath

Sheikh Issa, described as the ideological guide for the bomb plotters, was arrested in Syria in 2009 and held in a small, dark Damascus detention center, according to accounts by Pakistani investigative journalist Syed Saleem Shahzad.

Two alleged plotters were arrested in Lahore, and another was killed in a Faisalabad shootout with the ISI a year after the blast.

In Portland, a federal grand jury indicted Khan secretly in December. He was arrested in March but freed pending trial in May 2014.

The Maldives is now wrestling with the legacy of violent radicals like Jaleel. Even mentioning his name raises hackles from government officials worried about spoiling the country's reputation as an island paradise.

"He was an aberration," said Rifat Afeef, a development consultant close to the current government.

Still, the government has stopped sending students to Pakistan.

Imad, the government spokesman, said the risk is perceived to be too great. "When people say, 'jihadis,' we're scared, damn scared," Imad said. "It's going to hurt our economy."

Ibrahim "Jalla" Jaleel.

Jalla works in tourism, coaching volleyball at an exclusive resort an hour's seaplane flight from the capital. He learned about Ali's death when he viewed a propaganda video posted six months later featuring his brother.

He remembers the day in May 2011, shortly after the U.S. raid on Osama bin Laden's compound in Pakistan, when he received a call saying the FBI wanted him to arrange a meeting with his brother's widows.

Jalla agreed on a restaurant near Mulee Aage, the Presidential Palace in Malé. Six Americans settled across the table, he recalled. There was small-talk about the temperate weather, the agents' accommodations at the Sheraton Maldives Full Moon resort. What Jalla remembers was a question he still asks himself.

Who, the agents wanted to know, was sending money to Ali Jaleel?

— Kimberly A.C. Wilson