Shadows in Our Midst

摘要

Can buying a snowblower, a barbecue and a couple of lawn mowers in Canada make you a suspected link to al-Qaeda? Michael John Hamdani, 44, became just that after a shopping spree late last October in Brampton, a city west of Toronto. The owners of a shop that he and a friend had patronized believed they had received bogus U.S. traveler's checks and alerted the police. A raid on the homes of Hamdani and his pal turned up an array of big-screen TVs and other luxury goods, $600,000 in forged American Express and Thomas Cook checks, a state-of-the-art counterfeiting operation complete with silk-screen equipment, ink stamps like those used by consular officials, and stacks of high-grade fake passports and other identity documents. Hamdani was tagged as the suspected mastermind. A Pakistani emigre, he had a rap sheet stretching as far as Brunei and was on the lam from a 1996 U.S. indictment for dealing in phony passports in New York.