Vol. 73/No. 6      February 16, 2009

“Mahmoud Omar, the FBI informer, followed my brother everywhere,” explained Inas Shnewer at the Militant Labor Forum January 30. Shnewer, a student at Rutgers University in Camden, New Jersey, is the sister of Mohamad Shnewer, one of five young men convicted last December of conspiracy to kill U.S. soldiers at Fort Dix.

Shnewer detailed how the informer was the one who prodded on her brother. “He took my brother to Fort Dix and told him ways to bomb the base,” she explained. “Omar told him, ‘you just talk, talk, and talk and don’t do anything,’” she said. “He even offered my brother $10,000 to buy weapons, which my brother refused.”

The defendants were all in their twenties when arrested in May 2007. They live in Cherry Hill, a New Jersey suburb of Philadelphia.

Mohamad Shnewer, originally from Jordan, drove a taxi in Philadelphia. Serdar Tatar is from Turkey and worked in a convenience store in Philadelphia. Three brothers—Eljvir Duka, Dritan Duka, and Shain Duka—are ethnic Albanians from the former Yugoslavia who ran a roofing business.

Lejla Duka, the 11-year-old daughter of Dritan Duka, shared the panel. She described the harassment she faces at her school. “I am being called a terrorist,” she explained. She said prison authorities have repeatedly denied her regular visits to her father, whom she has only seen twice in the last two years.

Ruth Robinett, speaking for the Socialist Workers Party at the forum, outlined the U.S. government’s long history of FBI informants and agents provocateurs, as well as the use by the government of conspiracy charges.

These policies, still being carried out today, Robinett said, are part of the preparations by the U.S. government and the rulers for the battles by working people that loom on the horizon. “This conviction by the government against these five men is an assault on the freedom of all us.”

Following their arrest in May 2007, the five men were denied bail and put in a special unit at the Federal Detention Center in Philadelphia.

Sentencing for the Fort Dix Five is scheduled for late April. The men could face life imprisonment.
 
 
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