Middle Eastern man on FBI’s list is captured near Chicago

By Mike Robinson

Associated Press

CHICAGO – A Middle Eastern man on the FBI list of people wanted for questioning in the terrorism investigation was captured outside Chicago, the FBI said Thursday.

Nabil Al-Marabh, 34, was arrested Wednesday night in suburban Justice by police and FBI agents, FBI spokeswoman Mary Muha said. She said he was being held on a warrant issued in Boston in March for assault with a knife.

Federal agents had been looking for him since at least Monday. That day, they raided a Detroit house with Al-Marabh’s name on the mailbox and arrested three men after discovering false visas, passports and other ID, as well as what appeared to be a diagram of an airport flight line.

The FBI list that Al-Marabh is on includes suspects, potential associates of the suspects, and potential witnesses related to the attacks, the FBI said.

While agents were in Detroit on Monday, Al-Marabh was in Three Oaks, in the southwestern corner of Michigan near the Indiana state line, getting a duplicate driver’s license, state authorities said.

The FBI said details of his capture were not immediately available.

In December, Al-Marabh was convicted of assault and battery with a dangerous weapon – a knife – in Boston. He was to have started serving a sentence in March but failed to show up.

During the raid in Detroit on Monday, federal agents found a cache of documents and arrested Karim Koubriti, 23, Ahmed Hannan, 33, and Farouk Ali-Haimoud, 21, on charges of having false immigration papers. The men were identified as resident aliens from Morocco and Algeria.

Agents also found a planner with handwriting in Arabic, according to court papers. The planner included information about an American base in Turkey, the “American foreign minister,” and Alia Airport in Jordan, the FBI said.

Investigators also found what appeared to be a diagram of an airport flight line, including aircraft and runways, according to the court document, which did not identify the airport.

Hannan and Koubriti briefly worked as dishwashers for an airline catering company, LSG Sky Chefs, near the Detroit airport between May and June, the company said. More recently, they worked for Technicolor in Livonia, putting together cardboard boxes for shipping DVDs and videos.

The FBI did not say where Al-Marabh was from; his former landlord in the Boston area, Marian Sklodowski, said Al-Marabh told him he was Palestinian.

In Massachusetts, where Al-Marabh lived from at least 1989 to 2000, he had worked for the Boston Cab Co., according to state driver’s license records.

All four men hold chauffeur’s licenses in Michigan, according to state records. Al-Marabh holds a commercial driver’s license and is certified to transport hazardous materials. Koubriti and Al-Marabh also hold commercial driving license endorsements allowing them to drive trucks and other large vehicles.