Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab spent the year of 2004-5 at the Sana Institute for the Arabic Language in Yemen.
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Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the Nigerian man accused of trying to bomb an airplane last week, already spoke fluent Arabic by the time he arrived here in Yemen for classes last summer, impressing his instructors with his command of the language he had supposedly come to improve.
Then, after six weeks in and out of class, the school got him an exit visa, and on Sept. 21 even arranged for a car that took Mr. Abdulmutallab to the airport, the director said.
“After that we never saw him again, and apparently he did not leave Yemen,” the director, Muhammed al-Anisi, said. “We heard later that he may have gone to Hadramawt,” the poor eastern province where Al Qaeda is strong, and from where Osama bin Laden’s father left poverty to make his fortune in Saudi Arabia.
In retrospect, Mr. Anisi suspects, Mr. Abdulmutallab simply used the school as a formal pretext to legally re-enter Yemen last summer after being recruited elsewhere by Al Qaeda.
“I do wonder if the school was an excuse,” he said, noting that Mr. Abdulmutallab remained in Yemen after his visa expired, disappearing into Yemen’s Qaeda training grounds and emerging on Christmas Day to try to blow up a packed airplane heading to Detroit. When he left Yemen in December, the authorities here acknowledge, no one stopped Mr. Abdulmutallab for overstaying his visa.
Mr. Anisi spoke publicly on Thursday for the first time, after three days of questioning by the Yemeni security services. His office is adorned with numerous framed certificates of appreciation for his teaching from the American Peace Corps, which closed its program years ago. Now Mr. Anisi is distraught at what is happening to the reputation of his language school.
Mr. Abdulmutallab had spent the academic year of 2004-2005 at this school, the Sana Institute for the Arabic Language, whose slogan is “Arabic with authenticity.” Back then, his Arabic was rudimentary, but he enjoyed his life here, including the presence of a Pizza Hut and a KFC. Afterward, Mr. Abdulmutallab went to school in London and became increasingly devout and then increasingly radical in his views.
Mr. Anisi wonders, like other analysts, where Mr. Abdulmutallab was recruited by Al Qaeda before coming back here, and whether his return to Yemen last summer, and to the language school, was organized for him to undergo training.
Thursday was Mr. Anisi’s first day back at work after the questioning. He was not formally arrested, and the security forces were polite, he said, but he insisted that he had no real key to the transformation of Mr. Abdulmutallab, now 23, whom he described in his latest period here as increasingly devout, generous, invariably polite and yet also unsociable.
Mr. Abdulmutallab was the only African student in the school of 70 students, and by the time he returned to the school here on Aug. 4, purportedly to improve his Arabic, “I found his Arabic was already so good, he was not really benefiting from the courses but was at the top of his class,” Mr. Anisi said.
Mr. Abdulmutallab often skipped class but did not seem to have many Yemeni friends, Mr. Anisi said, and other foreign students at the school said his devotion to Islam, including attendance at nearby mosques in the old city for prayer five times a day, cut him off from others. On the last 10 days of the holy month of Ramadan, Mr. Abdulmutallab performed “Itikaf,” remaining in the mosque for prayer and Koranic readings, concentrating on the divine, and isolated from excessive socializing, eating and sleeping.
“Even that was not strange to me,” Mr. Anisi said. “Many devout Yemenis do the same.”
One of Mr. Abdulmutallab’s fellow students offered a similar assessment. “He only showed up for a few classes, and then he said he wanted to focus on prayer and Ramadan,” said the student, who spoke on condition of anonymity and referred to the Islamic holy month that began this year in late August.
While always polite, Mr. Abdulmutallab once cut off another student, an American named Sigurd Sorensen, from walking in front of him while he was praying, Mr. Sorensen told reporters. The two later apologized to each other. Other students said Mr. Abdulmutallab never played music in his room, but often was reading the Koran.
Mr. Anisi started this school in 2000, in a beautiful old house in the Tabariya neighborhood of Old Sana. At first, the school attracted numerous British citizens and Americans learning Arabic at colleges and universities who wanted to study it intensively and live immersed in the language.
But Al Qaeda’s attack on the U.S.S. Cole happened here that year, and then there were the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, and now, Mr. Anisi said sadly, “there are very few Americans or Europeans who come.”
Most of the students here are from Indonesia and Malaysia, and some from South Korea and China. Many students are not Muslim, though most female students veil themselves when they go outside, following local custom.
“I remember him as very friendly, quiet and respectful,” Mr. Anisi said of Mr. Abdulmutallab. “You would never imagine he would do this horrible thing. From smiling and helping to killing, I can’t believe it. We taught him Arabic here, not religion.”
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