http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/05/10/news/terror.php Brothers charged with plotting terrorism trace roots to Macedonia By Kareem Fahim and Andrea Elliott
Thursday, May 10, 2007 <http://anad.tacoda.net/ads/sk13981a-map.cgi/SZ=120X600A/V=2.1S/BRC=51888/BC PG41208.65304.74723/> PHILADELPHIA: The three Duka brothers, Eljvir, Shain and Dritan, not only prayed here at Al Aqsa Islamic Center but also recently began repairing its roof. The work came naturally to them, as members of a large family of ethnic Albanian immigrants who own more than a dozen roofing companies in New York and New Jersey. They fixed the roof free of charge, at the prodding of their imam and in the hopes of accruing good deeds. But the job remains half finished after the brothers and three other Muslim men were taken into custody this week, charged with plotting a terrorist attack against soldiers at the Fort Dix military reservation in New Jersey. Their arrests reverberated through the extended Duka family, as far as Debar, a village in Macedonia near the Albanian border that is the family's ancestral home. "It's fine to be a religion man," said Murat Duka, 55, a distant relative of the defendants and the first of about 200 Dukas to move to the Northeast United States, arriving in 1975 to work as a roofer. "But if you get too much to the religion, you get out of your mind and you do stupid things." More than one-sixth of the world away in Debar, where the influence of U.S. émigrés is seen in restaurants named Manhattan, Dallas and Miami, Elez Duka, a first cousin of the three suspects, expressed disbelief that they could have been involved in a plot inspired by Islamic radicals. "This has to be political propaganda," said Elez Duka, 29, who recently opened an Internet café there with money sent by his brothers in the United States. "America has always helped us." A portrait is emerging of the five who face charges of conspiring to kill U.S. military personnel, which could send them to prison for life. Much less is known about the sixth, Agron Abdullahu, 24, who faces lesser charges, carrying up to 10 years' imprisonment. Serdar Tatar, 23, a Turkish immigrant who lives in Philadelphia, had grown so religious over the past two years that his father, Muslim Tatar, said they had become estranged. Serdar Tatar's wife, who is pregnant with twins, said he was so busy working that he rarely had time to pray but sometimes read the Koran and helped her 11-year-old son with his homework. Mohamad Shnewer, 22, a Palestinian born in Amman, Jordan, kept up an exhausting routine of work, sleep and prayer for the past year, according to his mother. He drove a cab at night in Philadelphia, had recently dropped out of college to help the family pay two mortgages and attended services occasionally at Al Aqsa. And there were the Dukas, ages 23, 26 and 28, who came to this country illegally more than a decade ago. The brothers, like so many of their relatives and fellow ethnic Albanian immigrants in the area, have owned a pizzeria and two roofing companies. The brothers are not from an Arabic-speaking nation - though one is married to a woman from Jordan - but they sometimes used Arabic names for their roofing businesses: Qadr, which in Arabic means "destiny," and Insalah, a variant of inshallah, "if God wills it." The lives of the Dukas and the other defendants began to intersect as early as 1999, when Tatar, Shnewer and Eljvir Duka were all enrolled at Cherry Hill West High School in Cherry Hill, New Jersey. One of Shnewer's five sisters married Eljvir Duka and is pregnant. On Wednesday, Lamese and Israa Shnewer, ages 12 and 14, stood in the threshold of their house in Cherry Hill, holding tabloid newspapers with their brother's picture splashed across the front. Cars slowed down as they passed. People snapped pictures with their cellphones. Israa pointed to a neighbor's house and said, "They hated us to begin with." The criminal complaint portrayed Shnewer as the leader of the group, speaking most frequently in taped conversations about tactics. But his mother, Faten Shnewer, said in an interview that the charges "made no sense." She said that televised images from the war in Iraq had angered him, and wondered whether, while he was watching the news, he had said something that was misinterpreted by the authorities. "He's a good boy," she said as she stood in the doorway of a relative's home. "I'm proud of who we are." Co-workers and relatives described him as shy with a sweet nature. "Mohamad was like a teddy bear," said Jaime Antrim, the manager of a restaurant in Marlton, New Jersey, where Shnewer once worked. He showed his religious devotion in some ways - he would not eat pizza cut with a knife that had come into contact with pork - but also served alcohol and did not break for the daily Muslim prayers. Muslim Tatar, who owns the SuperMario's Pizza restaurant near Fort Dix from which the authorities say the suspects took a map of the base, said his son Serdar had gravitated to radical Islam in recent years, prompting a rift between them. "I'm not a religious person," he said. "I don't want my son to be a religious person, but he was a religious person." The family came to the United States from Turkey in 1992, settling in Cherry Hill. Muslim Tatar said he believed that his son fell in with the wrong crowd in high school, when he met some of the others now in jail with him. On at least one occasion, Tatar said, his son brought one of the others to visit him at the pizza parlor in Cookstown, New Jersey. "I told him, 'I don't like this kid, I don't want you together,' " Tatar recalled. Though the criminal complaint says Serdar Tartar became familiar with Fort Dix from delivering pizzas on the base and procured the map in November, his wife said he had not worked at the restaurant in two years, and his father said SuperMario's had been delivering to the base for only three months. "Nobody take map," the elder Tatar said. After quitting SuperMario's, Serdar Tatar went to work for 7-Eleven and recently became manager of one of the chain's stores near Temple University in Philadelphia. His wife of one year, Khalida Mirzhyeiva, who was born in Russia, said he had worked long shifts and rarely gone to the mosque. "He planned to have a child and a good family," Mirzhyeiva, 29, said by telephone in an interview that was translated from Russian by a neighbor. "He did not plan to kill anybody." "He isn't a terrorist," she said. "He follows his religion, the Muslim religion, and he cannot kill." Dritan, Eljvir and Shain Duka were all born in Debar, Macedonia. The extended family's trek to the United States began with Murat Duka, who opened a roofing company in New York in 1980, five years after he arrived. When conditions in Macedonia deteriorated in 1985, a stream of relatives began coming to New York, where some learned the roofing trade from him, he said. Today, about 40 to 50 Duka families live in New York and New Jersey. Many of them settled on Staten Island, a borough of New York City that is home to a thriving mosque for ethnic Albanians. "Everybody's shocked from this," said Ferid Bedrolli, imam of the Albanian Islamic Cultural Center in Staten Island, where the three Duka defendants and their father used to pray before moving from New York to Cherry Hill in the late 1990s. "They didn't look like really they are bad people." [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] -------------------------- Want to discuss this topic? 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