A graduate of Owings Mills High School is among 14 suspected terrorists taken from secret CIA prisons and brought to Guantanamo Bay for trial, the government said.
Majid Khan is accused of researching to help al-Qaida plots to blow up gas stations and poison reservoirs in the U.S.
He moved from Pakistan to the Baltimore area as a teenager in 1996 and joined up with a local Islamic organization after his 1999 graduation from Owings Mills, according to a news release from National Intelligence Director John Negroponte?s office.
A woman pulling up in front of the Khans? brick home in Baltimore County Monday afternoon identified herself as Majid?s sister and said she was too tired to talk at length, having just driven home from college. She said her family has eight children.
When asked for her reaction to her brother?s arrest, she said, “No words.”
Principal Diane Garbarino of Owings Mills High said nobody teaching at the school remembers Khan as a student there.
“None of us do, no,” she said.
Khan returned to Pakistan in 2002 and, through his uncle and a cousin, met accused senior al-Qaida member Khalid Sheik Mohammed, according to the news release. He passed a test showing he was capable of a suicide mission and was chosen, based on his English-language skills and knowledge of the United States, to take part in a potential attack in the country.
Khan was linked to several other accused al-Qaida operatives, including a U.S. citizen convicted of working on a plan to cut the suspension cables of bridges, according to the release. He allegedly asked a permanent U.S. resident while he was in Pakistan to impersonate him, making it seem as if Khan had never left the country so that he could re-enter.
Khan and 13 others have been named high-value terrorists and are being held at a prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, President Bush said last week.
