Anwar Al-Awlaki Dead: U.S.-Born Al Qaeda Cleric Killed In Yemen
Al-Awlaki's parents were from Yemen. His father, Nasser al-Aulaqi, was a Fulbright Scholar.
al-Awlaki booked for soliciting prostitution, 1997
9/11 hijacker Nawaf al-Hazmi, for whom al-Awlaki was reportedly a spiritual adviser
Writing on the IslamOnline.net website six days after the 9/11 attacks, al-Awlaki suggested that Israeli intelligence agents might have been responsible for the attacks, and that the FBI “went into the roster of the airplanes, and whoever has a Muslim or Arab name became the hijacker by default.”
Months after the 9/11 attacks, as the U.S. Secretary of the Army was eager to have a presentation from a moderate Muslim as part of an outreach effort to ease tensions with Muslim-Americans, a Pentagon employee invited al-Awlaki to a luncheon in the Secretary’s Office of General Counsel.
Al-Awlaki was the Congressional Muslim Staffer Association’s first imam to conduct a prayer service at the U.S. Capitol in 2002. The prayers were for Muslim congressional staffers and officials for the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR).
The FBI conducted extensive investigations of al-Awlaki, and he was observed crossing state lines with prostitutes in the D.C. area.[25][58] To arrest him, the FBI considered invoking the little-used Mann Act, a federal law prohibiting interstate transport of women for “immoral purposes.”[25] But before investigators could detain him, al-Awlaki left for Yemen in March 2002.[25][58]
Weeks later, he posted an essay in Arabic titled “Why Muslims Love Death” on the Islam Today website, praising the Palestinian suicide bombers‘ fervor. Months later, at a videotaped lecture in a London mosque, he lauded them in English.[25][58] By July 2002, he was under investigation for having been sent money by the subject of an U.S. Joint Terrorism Task Force investigation. His name was placed on an early version of what is now the federal terror watch list.[8][25][91]