By Arun Kumar
Washington, Nov 9 (IANS) US investigators probing a deadly mass shooting at Fort Hood are examining possible links between the alleged gunman and an American-born imam said to be a supporter and leading promoter of Al Qaeda, the Washington Post reported Monday.

The suspect, Maj. Nidal M. Hasan, attended the Dar al-Hijrah mosque in Falls Church, a Washington suburb in Virginia, in 2001 when its spiritual leader was Anwar al-Aulaqi, a figure who crossed paths with Al Qaeda associates, including two Sep 11 hijackers, the daily said citing an unnamed senior US official.

Since Aulaqi left in 2002 and settled in Yemen, his lectures promoting the strategies of an Al Qaeda military leader have shown up in computer files of suspects in terrorism cases in the US, Canada and Britain, officials were cited as saying.

The Post cited a federal law enforcement official as saying that investigators’ operating theory remains that Hasan acted alone and without provocation or exhortation from an overseas person.

However, new leads are being pursued based on information gleaned from a methodical review by investigators of Hasan’s computer and his multiple e-mail accounts. Those include visits to Web sites espousing radical Islamist ideas, another unnamed senior official was quoted as saying.

“There’s a massive effort here to look at the Web sites he visited,” the unnamed law enforcement official was quoted as saying. “That’s part of what’s ongoing: what you learn from it, then you’ve got to figure out what it means.”

He added: “The important thing is, the jury’s still out on motivation.”

Shaker Elsayed, the senior imam at Dar al-Hijrah, a long-established mosque whose thousands of worshipers form one of the largest traditional Muslim congregations on the East Coast, told the Post that Hasan prayed there since 2008 and sought his help to find a wife. But he could not verify whether Hasan ever met Aulaqi.

Aulaqi has been identified as a spiritual adviser of 9/11 hijackers Khalid Almihdhar and Nawaf Alhazmi. The 9/11 Commission Report and a subsequent congressional report noted that they met with Aulaqi at a mosque in San Diego in 2000 and after he moved to Dar al-Hijrah in 2001, according to the Post.

The Fedreal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) investigated Aulaqi nearly a decade ago, after he briefly served as vice president of the US branch of a Yemeni charity that federal prosecutors later described as a front organization used to support Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden.

FBI later reported that it did not have reason to prosecute or detain Aulaqi, who left the US in 2002 and has lived in Yemen since 2004, the Post said.