New Jersey House Front-Runner Once Testified for Sheikh Linked to World Trade Center Bombing

The American website "Washington Free Beacon" revealed today (Monday) that U.S. Democratic Party member Adam Hamawy, who served as a defense witness in the trial of Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman, one of the figures behind the attack on the Twin Towers, is the leading candidate in the race for the House of Representatives from the state of New Jersey.

According to the report, Hamawy testified on behalf of Abdel-Rahman, known as the Blind Sheikh, who was sentenced in 1995 to life in prison for his involvement in the 1993 attack in New York, near the Twin Towers, in which six people were killed and about 1,000 were injured in a car bombing. The sheikh, an al-Qaeda operative, served as an inspiration in his activities to terrorists

Hamawy, a plastic surgeon from Princeton, is leading in the polls and is a candidate to replace retiring Congresswoman Bonnie Watson Coleman (Democrat). In his past courtroom testimony, he described the terrorist sheikh as a "community leader" who did not speak about terror or violence. According to the report in the "Free Beacon," the trial showed that Hamawy was present on a 13-hour trip in 1991 with the Blind Sheikh to a conference in Detroit that dealt with "global Islamic economics," where several extremist speakers appeared and spoke about jihad and infidels, including the Blind Sheikh.

Victims and survivors of the World Trade Center attack reacted with shock to the possibility that someone close to the terror planner, the "Blind Sheikh," could become a member of Congress. Many published condemnations. "If someone really wants to keep New Jersey blue, I’d find another Democrat to vote for. I couldn’t, with a clear conscience, vote for this man. And I wouldn’t encourage anyone else to do so either. There are some things that are just unforgivable," Michael Mako, a retired fashion consultant who lives in Morristown, told the "Washington Free Beacon."

Mako’s father, William Mako, worked at the World Trade Center as an assistant chief mechanical inspector. He was killed in the explosion during his lunch break in the basement of the North Tower. "These are people who are connected to the truly horrific murder of my father. Every time I see things like this, it’s hard because your immediate reaction is simply disbelief," Michael Mako continued. He added: "It’s hard for me to believe he didn’t know how bad this sheikh was, given how close he was to him."

James Outterbridge — who survived the 1993 attacks and the attacks in 2001 — said he is still in treatment for his experiences in the buildings decades later. "What happened in 1993 not only affected me, but was a foreshadowing of September 11," Outterbridge told the "Free Beacon" from North Carolina, where he is now retired.

Outterbridge, who worked at a bank and is credited with helping save hundreds of lives on September 11, said there is no place for people like Hamawy in Congress: "People who have those kinds of ties must not be allowed to come here, run for political office, and then who knows, further down the road, push their agenda. He is not fit to run for political office in our country."

Sheikh Abdel-Rahman, who died in an American prison in 2017, was an Egyptian Muslim leader. He belonged to the Muslim Brotherhood and developed ties with two of Egypt’s most militant organizations, Egyptian Islamic Jihad and al-Gama'a al-Islamiyya ("the Islamic Group"). He served time in an Egyptian prison for offenses involving attempts to harm the regime. He also issued a religious ruling permitting the assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat in October 1981.

In the mid-1980s, he moved to Afghanistan, where he connected with Osama bin Laden and Abdullah Azzam, a senior Muslim Brotherhood figure and one of the founders of al-Qaeda. In April 1991, Abdel-Rahman obtained a green card from the immigration office in Newark, New Jersey. Months later, it was discovered that he was on a terror watch list, but because of an appeal he filed, he was not deported from the U.S. and instead sought "political asylum." Later, he issued a religious ruling permitting the killing of Jews and preached in New York mosques in favor of harming the United States. From one of those mosques came the terrorists responsible for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.