Yemeni cleric 'blesses' US rampage

17 Nov 2009, 7:33 am   -   Source: AAP
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A radical Yemeni cleric who exchanged emails with the suspected Fort Hood gunman "blessed the act" on Monday.

A radical Yemeni cleric who exchanged emails with the suspected Fort Hood gunman "blessed the act" on Monday and said the US shooting spree that left 13 dead was "permissible" under Islam.

In his first interview since the November 5 rampage at the Texas military base, Anwar al-Awlaqi said the attack, which also wounded 42 people, was "permissible" under Islam because it was a form of jihad, or holy war.

"I blessed the act because it was against a military target," Awlaqi told Abdulelah Hider Shaea, a Yemeni journalist who interviewed him for The Washington Post.

"And the soldiers who were killed were not normal soldiers, but those who were trained and prepared to go to Afghanistan and Iraq. America was the one who first brought the battle to Muslim countries," Awlaqi said..

US intelligence agencies intercepted emails between Fort Hood suspect Major Nidal Hasan and Awlaqi, who is now in Yemen but was a leader of the Dar al-Hijrah mosque outside Washington attended by Hasan and two hijackers in the September 11, 2001 attacks.

In about a dozen email exchanges, Hasan seemed to question the US military involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan, often using "evidence from sharia (Islamic law) that what America was doing should be confronted", Awlaqi said.

The cleric, who described Hasan as a man serious about his Muslim faith and eager to learn how to interpret sharia, said the psychiatrist first contacted him in an email dated December 17, 2008 recalling that he had previously attended the Dar al-Hijrah mosque.

Awlaqi declined to be interviewed by an American journalist writing for The Washington Post, preferring to be questioned instead by a Yemeni at his home in the restive province of Shabwa in southern Yemen.

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