News that New York bomb-plot suspect was an ordinary, fun-loving Beiruti has shocked liberal Lebanon. But his arrest raises more questions than answers, says Lucy Fielder It would be an attack to end all devastating attacks -- a suicide bomb on the stretch of the New York subway running under the Hudson River that would cause the tunnel roof to cave in and flood the financial district, killing thousands. The FBI announced they had uncovered such a plot last Friday and the mastermind, among eight suspects, was a 31-year-old university lecturer arrested in Beirut in April. Lebanese security forces said they closed in on Hammoud after monitoring Internet chat-rooms -- on an FBI tip-off -- led them to his room in the well-to-do Clemenceau district of central Beirut. "The information found on Hammoud's personal computer was very important because it contained maps and bombing plans that were being prepared," acting Interior Minister Ahmed Fatfat told a local television station. Hammoud -- codenamed Al-Amir Al-Andalousi in what could be a reference to a past link to Spain or simply to a great Islamic era -- confessed under interrogation to swearing allegiance to Osama bin Laden and planning to travel to training camps in Pakistan this summer, Lebanon's Internal Security Forces said in a statement. It said he received light weapons training in the Palestinian camp of Ain Al-Hilweh, where he met a foreigner who requested that he guarantee apartments, recruit people and collect weapons and funds for the operation, to be carried out in late 2006. At the time of his arrest, the communiqué said, he was living "a life of pleasure, far from suspicions". Hammoud, who taught economics at the Lebanese International University, was asked to continue his life of partying, girls and cars in the Lebanese capital to give the impression even to his own family of a "frivolous and uncommitted youth". Hammoud's mother, a widowed artist, also told journalists that he had girlfriends and drank. So far, so chillingly familiar. In addition to many playboy-turned- militant parallels elsewhere in the Arab world, not least bin Laden himself and Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi, Lebanon heard all this before with Ziyad Jarrah. The only Lebanese suicide hijacker among the 19 who perpetrated the 11 September attacks was also portrayed as fun-loving and law-abiding. Other reports suggest Hammoud had shown signs of a sudden conversion, adopting the flowing white dress of devout Sunni Islam and changing his habits. American University of Beirut professor Ahmed Moussalli, an expert on political Islam, said he had learned from sources close to Hammoud that a transformation occurred months before. "I don't think he was undercover, posing as a liberal, at the time he was arrested," he said. Also unclear is how advanced the plot was, and therefore how serious a threat the group posed. "We're wondering if he was really at the stage of proper planning," a senior Lebanese security source told Al-Ahram Weekly. "How come he'd chat on his own mobile and his own PC? He was intelligent, an engineer, he must have known his line could be traced. How come he sent his maps by e-mail? This question needs to be raised," he said. The security source confirmed that one of the eight alleged co- plotters, a Syrian, had an undisclosed connection to 13 alleged Al-Qaeda members who were arrested in Lebanon in December following a rocket attack on Israel from the south. The Al-Qaeda in Iraq, then led by the late Al-Zarqawi, claimed responsibility for that strike. Observers say a strong contingent of Sunni hardliners took part in destructive demonstrations in February over the Danish cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohamed. Moussalli said that despite such cases, it was not clear violent Sunni extremism was on the rise. The cellular nature of Al-Qaeda- type groups meant that in Lebanon, as elsewhere, small pockets could interact via the Internet as part of a global rather than a Lebanese trend. He said the "main, motivating leadership of such groups was often from backgrounds such as Hammoud's -- the foot-soldiers are from the poor." Radwan Al-Sayed, a leading expert who has close contacts with the world of Lebanese Islamists, said Hammoud was a mystery. "He's an enigmatic figure. He is not known to people who are active on the Islamic scene -- Islamists such as Al-Jamaat Al-Islamiya and Al-Ahbash or the Salafists." Al-Sayed, who is a professor of Islamic studies at the Lebanese University, said those groups were known and in Lebanon, were non-violent. He declined to speculate on Hammoud or Jarrah. Nonetheless, the northern cities of Tripoli and Akkar and the southern city of Sidon, as well as the Ain Al-Hilweh camp, are more commonly seen as potential militant Sunni hotbeds, not affluent Clemenceau. Beirut's Sunnis are traditionally Lebanon's middle class merchants and businessman and the most apolitical of its sects, playing a comparatively small role in the 1975- 90 Civil War. But the year since former prime minister Rafik Al-Hariri's death in February 2005 has seen a rise in sectarianism in precarious Lebanon. Over the past few months the Sunni-Shia split has deepened, influenced by a parallel, bloodier development in Iraq. Pro-Syrian Shia groups Hizbullah and Amal have reasserted their presence and that of their sect and allies on the political stage over the last six months, after last year's anti-Syrian protests marginalised them politically and pressured the Syrians to withdraw in May 2005. "Here you will find that almost all the radical Sunni groups are anti-Shia groups," Moussalli said. "Some of these groups believe the Shia are taking over." Al-Hariri is widely credited, if with some exaggeration, as the man who connected Sunnis with the other sects and united them. His son Saad, the leader of the parliamentary majority "future" bloc, commands less widespread loyalty, particularly in the security vacuum that occurred after the Syrian withdrawal. "Syria was more able to crack down on these major radical groups or at least to stop them doing something dangerous," Moussalli said. In the post-Hariri chaos, each political group is playing to its own audience to secure support, deepening divisions. A "national dialogue" of leaders that was supposed to resolve the political and sectarian crisis drags on without end. It remains to be seen whether Lebanon's political and sectarian woes could push a frustrated fringe into the arms of violent Sunni groups. But in common with other Arab governments, the Hariri- Seniora government's open alliance with the United States and France sits increasingly uncomfortably with the traditional Arabism and regional sympathies of their supporters. Such views are unlikely to be discarded, especially when confronted with Israel's escalating attacks on the Gaza Strip and worsening sectarian bloodshed in Iraq.
