Ten years ago Monday, about 20 FBI agents in helmets and military gear swarmed into a warehouse in Dearborn, the red laser dots from their M4 rifles flickering around the room.

A few minutes after 12 noon, one of the agents sicced a K9 dog on Imam Luqman Abdullah, the 53-year-old Muslim leader who headed a nearby mosque on Detroit's westside.

Seconds later, four of the agents fired at Abdullah, striking him 20 times and killing him.

The U.S. Department of Justice, Michigan Attorney General, and Dearborn Police all concluded that the FBI acted appropriately on Oct. 28, 2009, when they killed Abdullah and arrested several of his followers in an undercover sting operation recorded on video by the FBI. They said that Abdullah fired first at the dog, a claim his attorneys strongly deny, saying there is no evidence he even had a gun.

Ten years later, family, friends and civil rights advocates are still reeling from the death of Abdullah — whom advocates say is the first mainstream religious leader to die in the U.S. at the hands of federal law enforcement in recent memory. No one was charged with any terrorism crime in the case, and authorities have not described any terrorist act he was planning.

"This event really changed all of our lives in a second," Abdullah's daghter, Qiyamah Regan, 45, of Detroit, said Saturday evening inside a Detroit mosque hosting an event to remember Abdullah. "Life hasn't been the same for none of us since this has happened. I think that anybody who's ever lost someone knows that when you lose someone you love, life is never the same. It's never going to be the same. All you do is adjust to the new life."

A decade later, the shooting has affected Detroit's African American and Muslim communities, especially the predominantly-black congregation at Masjid Al-Haqq that Abdullah, often known as Imam Luqman, led for years.

The FBI's use of three informants in the case has made some suspicious and also distrustful of law enforcement. Last year on Sept. 14, a follower of Abdullah who was in the warehouse at the time of the shooting, Detric Driver, was killed by Detroit Police conducting a raid in an unrelated case. And Abdullah's wife, Amina Abdullah, was later deported to Tanzania.

"It definitely damaged the whole community," said Abdullah's son, Omar Regan, 44, of Los Angeles. "The mosque isn't even the same anymore."

A community seeking answers

Abdullah's supporters say they are still confused and seeking answers as to what happened on that October day in 2009 near the corner of Michigan and Miller in the eastern part of Dearborn.

Attorneys for the family of Abdullah are calling on the FBI and other agencies to release all the information it has on the case, including the full names of the four agents who shot Abdullah. The last names of the shooters were not released in a report the Free Press obtained from the state Attorney General in 2010. The FBI had said they are not releasing the names because of safety concerns.

Civil remedies are no longer an option because a lawsuit filed against the FBI was thrown out by a federal judge on a technicality regarding the names of the FBI agents and the ruling was upheld in 2015 by the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals. The Supreme Court didn't pick up the case, shutting the door to having the case hear in court.

"I wanted to go to court so bad," said Omar Regan.

Attorneys are asking the FBI to provide evidence that Abdullah fired a gun, saying that the caliber of the bullets that entered the dog matched the caliber of the M4 rifles the FBI agents were using, not the glock the FBI alleges Abdullah had. Attorneys for Abdullah filed an affidavit of Muhammad Abdul Salaam, a colleague of Abdullah who was in the warehouse at the time of the shooting, that said Abdullah didn't have a gun and was shot while he was on his back.

"Release the evidence we're asking for," said Dawud Walid, executive director of the Michigan chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). "Release the information. ... Let the public see."

The FBI Detroit office did not return a message seeking comment. The U.S. Attorney's Office in Detroit for the Eastern District of Michigan did not comment.

In the past, the FBI has maintained that Abdullah was an armed and dangerous radical who often criticized law enforcement and was trying to establish an Islamic Sunni state in Michigan, claims his supporters say are ludicrous. Abdullah was with a Muslim group headed by the former black power leader H. Rap Brown, who later converted to Islam and is now known as Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin; Al-Amin is serving a prison sentence for fatally shooting an Atlanta police officer. The four-year FBI probe into Abdullah started after a former member of his mosque had shot two Detroit police officers in 2006.

Abdullah was a convert to Islam and was an orthodox Sunni, one of many African Americans who converted to Islam after a rise in black power movements in the 1960s. The FBI said he talked about how he would not let police capture him or take his guns.

Walid, who had known Abdullah for years, said Abullah and his mosque tried to help the needy around them even though they themselves often struggled to survive. At times, the mosque couldn't even afford to pay their heating bills on time and would have prayers in a freezing room, he said.

"Every Sunday morning that mosque, in one of the poorest neighborhoods in America, he was involved in feeding indigent people as well as hungry, malnourished children," Walid said. "I remember one time going to the mosque to pray and the heat got cut off and people were sitting in the prayer sanctuary wrapped up with blankets in the wintertime."

His daughter Qiyamah said "his main focus was his faith, his family and his community. He loved to see the unity amongst people, to bring people together. That was what he tried to do in many forms, one of which a lot of us know was doing soup kitchens on Sunday, which still goes on the block ... having community dinners in the Masjid, and making for the children different events and functions."

While the FBI said Abdullah and his associates were extremists, neighbors and others told a different story. The mayor of Detroit at the time of the shooting, Dave Bing, told the Free Press a few weeks after the shooting that an independent investigation was needed: "A couple of my former employees were part of that mosque. I've known them for a long time and they're good, solid people. ... I don't think we can just sweep it under the carpet."

The shooting death of Abdullah came in the years after the Sept. 11 attacks when federal law enforcement ramped up its investigations into Muslims and terrorism, often usi. Civil rights advocates say that Abdullah was unfairly targeted because of anti-black and anti-Muslim prejudice.

The FBI spent years investigating Abdullah using informants and wiretaps that recorded his views, but "as much as they tried, they couldn't get him" or his followers on terrorism charges, said Lena Masri, the national litigation director for the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

"I think that the investigation into Imam Luqman and his congregation, it was fueled by biased perceptions of law enforcement — of Muslims and black people combined," Walid said. "When that FBI special shooting team went to the warehouse that day for the raid, it's already been set in their mind that they were going to confront someone who has violent and extreme religious views, and on top of that he's black. And we know for a fact that unconscious bias from law enforcement views black bodies as more dangerous than white bodies. ... Had Imam Luqman been white and Jewish, or white and Christian, not only would his congregation not have been targeted that way, but he probably would be walking around today preaching."

Shereef Akeel, who filed the lawsuit against the FBI said: "It's one of those cases that still haunts us to this day. It's been a total miscarriage of justice. ... The guy had over 20 bullets riddled in his body, several in his privates and there has not been, to this day, a finding or a scintilla of evidence that Imam Luqman did anything wrong. ... There are people out there that have not been held to account and to answer for their conduct."

Recalling father's death

The FBI rented a warehouse in Dearborn for their take-down operation of Abdullah.

For two days, they rehearsed in the warehouse how they were going to lure Abdullah into the place with the help of an informant named Jabril, who was white and posed as a convert to Islam. Jabril had infiltrated the mosque by providing the members with temporary job opportunities. The identities of the two other informants are still unknown, Walid said.

Jabril told the congregants he needed their help to move some large TVs at a warehouse in Dearborn, said family of Abdullah and attorneys. The FBI had purchased the TVs and set up the whole operation, alleging the mosque members were taking part in a stolen goods operation, but Abdullah's associates say they weren't aware the TVs were stolen.

The day of the operation, there were 66 agents on the scene, including the head of FBI Detroit at the time, Andy Arena.

The FBI team first set off explosive devices as a diversionary tactic. Abdullah and others flinch and jump after they hear the loud noises of the devices. Abdullah then scampers into a trailer, as seen in the video released by the state Attorney General.

The FBI said it told him to lie on the ground and show his hands. Abdullah can be seen moving to get down on the ground, but then the view is blocked to the viewer by a stack of TVs.

After Abdullah was attacked by the police dog named 'Freddy,' the shooting took place in just four seconds. The shooting did not appear on the video recording by the FBI because the view was blocked by the TVs.

Moments later, police flew out the dog on a helicopter to a veterinary center in Madison Heights, while Abdullah's body was left on the warehouse floor, according to Dearborn Police and Michigan Attorney General reports. The dog was on an operating floor within 15 minutes.

The FBI says Abdullah died after being shot, but Masri said he may have still been alive and should have been given medical attention at a hospital.

"He was left to die," Masri said.

Masri said that after the shooting "the crime scene was tampered with" and Abdullah's body was moved to another spot.

She says the FBI could have apprehended Abdullah at home instead of setting up a sting operation with a "military style raid." Masri maintains that "the intention was to kill him that day. ... The government's narrative of what happened that day is not true."

Three of the FBI agents who shot Abdullah were with a special Hostage Rescue Team (HRT) brought in from outside Michigan that was used across the U.S. and in countries like Iraq and Afghanistan. After the shooting, they and another FBI agent who shot him were flown out and not interviewed for six months, said files released by the Michigan Attorney General in 2010. The agent who fired the most bullets, eight, was in Iraq when the investigators interviewed him about Abdullah's shooting.

In the state Attorney General and Dearborn Police report, FBI agents maintain they feared for their life after Abdullah was seen holding a gun and then fired on the dog, which they said was in the general direction of the agents.

Some in the African American Muslim communities of Detroit describe Abdullah as a shaheed, a martyr for Islam. Others compare him to Malcolm X or Imam Husayn, a grandson of Islam's prophet killed in battle fighting an unjust ruler.

"The community never recovered" from his death," said Jermaine Carey, a member of Abdullah's congregation who is close to his family. "They're trying to keep it moving, but there hasn't been a real recovery."

Outside of the African American Muslim community, the shooting split the Muslim-American population, with some siding with the FBI's negative characterization. After the shooting, the FBI held a meeting with local imams at which they said Abdullah was a radical at odds with mainstream Islam.

A few days after the shooting, a spokesman for the Islamic Center of America in Dearborn, a predominantly Arab-American mosque, compared Abdullah to a KKK leader.

Walid blasted non-black Muslims who supported the FBI over Abdullah's congregation, saying that prejudice against African Americans played a role in lack of support. He said some had threatened to cut off donations to Council on American-Islamic Relations if they worked on Abdullah's case.

There "were donors who told us 'drop the case or we're not going to give to your organization anymore,'" Walid said.

"The strategy was to divide and conquer" the Muslim community, said Marsi, "and it worked."

Abdullah's family did receive support, though, from several African American Christian pastors. Rev. Charles Williams of Detroit spoke at the remembrance event Saturday, telling the crowd: "10 years later, we still haven’t got justice."

Despite the painful loss, the children of Abdullah say they are trying to keep strong and remembering what their father meant to them.

Omar Regan said he still often has dreams of his father. In one of them, he's speaking on FaceTime with his father while people in Detroit were gathering around him seeing Abdullah through his phone.

"What's really frustrating: You never got your day in court, you never got to have a case being heard and they threw it out on some minor technicality," Regan said.

Carey said he remembers Abdullah as "a man of the people. ... He loved the people."

Qiyamah Regan, the daughter, said she recalls getting a letter from the FBI shortly after the shooting that notified her she and her family had been under surveillance. She worries today still about law enforcement.

But while she's still upset over what happened, his lessons will keep her strong.

"The strength he had, it trickled down" to me, she said. "I'm grateful for his teachings, his guidance."

Contact Niraj Warikoo:nwarikoo@freepress.com, 313-223-4792, Twitter @nwarikoo