FBI comparing DNA to link Somalia bombing with Seattle man

The FBI in Seattle is comparing DNA recovered from last week's suicide bombing in Somalia with that of the man's relatives, according to a federal law enforcement source familiar with the investigation.

FBI agents are investigating whether an American Somali refugee from Seattle was involved in the bombing on a peacekeeping base in Somalia that killed 21 people.

The father and mother of the Somali man have provided DNA samples to law enforcement officials, Abdirahman Warsame, a Somali-American who operates a Web site called the Terror Free Somalia Foundation, said today.

Warsame, 38, said he tracked down the father, Mohamud Mohamad, Thursday at a Rainier Valley business. The father spoke to him about the suspected death of his 18-year-old son, Omar, and his contacts with investigators, Warsame said.

The father is upset and "mourning the loss of his son," while being embarrassed about the youth's apparent connection to the bombing, said Warsame, an American Somali who came to the United States in 1996.

"He's very sorry about the tragedy" and "ashamed of the whole thing," Warsame said.

At the suggestion of law enforcement, the father disconnected his phone line because the number had been published on a Somali Web site, Warsame said.

The father recounted that his son returned to Somalia in 2007, after the youth began to change the last few months before he left, Warsame said. The youth, whose family also includes up to eight siblings, came to the U.S. about four years ago, Warsame said.

Warsame said the father complained that "something happened" to his son, who had been a "normal kid."

The youth may have been in one of the two stolen United Nations cars that Islamic insurgents detonated in an African Union peacekeeping base Sept. 17.

The FBI believes "outside influences" are at work in Seattle's Somali community, trying to recruit and radicalize young men to carry out jihad in their homeland. They are fighting to overthrow the United Nations-backed government, whose forces currently only hold pockets of the capital with the help of some 5,000 African Union peacekeepers.

Those influences — whether they be radical Islamic Web sites or outside recruiters — are "a danger to the Somali community, and the Seattle community at large," Special Agent Fred Gutt of the FBI's Seattle field office said Thursday.

Sahra Farah, the director of the Somali Community Services of Seattle, said she hopes to find out about the danger posed to young Somalis at a community meeting where she's planning to talk about the report that the Seattle man killed the 21 peacekeepers and civilians when he set off a suicide truck-bomb at a checkpoint in Mogadishu.

"We want to know, 'Is it happening here? Has anyone heard of it?' Sometimes you never know it's coming into your community until the last minute and it's already happened," said Farah, who has yet to set a date for the meeting.

She said it's hard to imagine why anybody would want to return to that war-weary nation.

"Nobody, especially teenagers, wants to go back to Somalia. People are dying there," she said.

Others who work with the thousands of Somali immigrants in Seattle say disaffected young people are vulnerable targets for recruiters.

"Our public school systems are simply ill-equipped to handle children who have spent most of their lives in refugee camps," Buddy Smith, 39, an after-school volunteer at the Somali Community Services Coalition office near Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, wrote in an e-mail. The coalition is separate from Farah's group.

"Some kids arrive in this country having never gone to school. They don't speak the language, and they have to learn on the fly," he said.

In an interview, Smith said many Somalis get frustrated and drop out of school, making them turn to gangs or become targets for militants seeking to recruit them.

Smith said he has not personally come across young people who have been approached by recruiters because the kids he sees are those who go to extra effort to get help with school work.

"It's the ones I don't see that I worry about," he said.

In Minnesota, as many as 20 young Somali men are believed to have traveled to Somalia to fight, most for a group called al-Shabaab, a terrorist organization with links to al-Qaida. Three have died, including 27-year-old Shirwa Ahmed, who blew up himself and 29 others in a suicide bombing at a United Nations checkpoint last fall.

Now, the FBI and immigration agents are looking at the Seattle man in the bombing last week, for which al-Shabaab has claimed credit. The FBI did not release his name.

The Seattle man would be the third from this area linked to the violence in Somalia or efforts to recruit Americans to fight there.

Gutt said agents and officials have met with several groups of Somalis in Seattle over the past months to discuss these and other issues. Gutt acknowledged there has been suspicion within the community, at least some of it stemming from post-9/11 investigations that targeted Somali money-changers and importers and users of the drug "khat."

Those raids were conducted by other federal law-enforcement agencies, he pointed out.

"These are hardworking people. They came here to make a better life for themselves. They don't want to go back" to their war-torn country, Gutt said. "So something is drawing these young people back. It's not their families. It's something from the outside."

Steve Miletich: 206-464-3302 or smiletich@seattletimes.com. Mike Carter: 206-464-3706 or mcarter@seattletimes.com

Seattle Times staff reporter Christine Clarridge contributed to this report. Information from The Associated Press is included in this report.