Acquaintances reflect on S. Jersey man’s terror arrest

Acquaintances of Sharif Mobley, the South Jersey native arrested in Yemen on homicide charges and for possible links to al-Qaeda, described him Friday as a playful youth who grew increasingly private before leaving for the Middle East.

"He never talked to anyone," Fareed Khan, 21, said yesterday as he entered the Islamic Society of Delaware in Newark for Friday prayers.

"He came here a lot but was really quiet," said Ali Khan, 19, another member of the mosque on his way to prayers.

Khan expressed astonishment to learn that Mobley, 26, was arrested last week in the Yemeni capital of Sana'a during a sweep of young al-Qaeda operatives with close ties to Abu Mansour, an Alabama-born extremist based in Somalia.

Hospitalized after his arrest, Mobley allegedly seized a guard's gun and shot and killed him before being recaptured.

Antoinette Penza, who watched Mobley grow up in Buena, Atlantic County, remembered him yesterday as "a fun kid, a jokester," who rode bikes and played with her sons when they were children.

Imam Anwar Muhaimin of the Quba Mosque in West Philadelphia, which Mobley attended as a boy and again as an adult, remembered him as a "happy-go-lucky kid" and "borderline silly." He said he warned Mobley against moving to Yemen, a poor country on the Arabian Peninsula, because it had become a hotbed of Islamic radicalism. Muhaimin made his remarks at an afternoon news conference, where he was joined by his brother and fellow imam, Anas.

They said that as a child, Mobley was enrolled in a weekend program at Quba for Arabic literacy and Koranic study. That program ended in 1994, and they did not see Mobley again until about 2002, when he started coming to prayers "very infrequently."

"At no point was he an established member," Anas Muhaimin said. "I saw him once or twice a year."

During that time, Mobley worked as a laborer at five nuclear power plants in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Maryland, and had the top security clearance for a laborer.

Anas Muhaimin said the last time he saw Mobley was in 2007, when the young man asked his advice about studying Arabic overseas.

"I strongly advised him against Yemen," he said, "but he chose to do otherwise. I was concerned about some of the rhetoric" in Yemen, "and what he could be exposed to."

"I told him he needed to seek out a stable, structured program," said Anas Muhaimin, who suggested Cairo or Fez, Morocco, as possibilities. But Mobley seemed fixated on Yemen, he said.

After that 2007 conversation, Anas Muhaimin said, Mobley never returned to the predominantly African American Quba Mosque. Later that year, however, he began attending Friday prayers at the large mosque in Newark, Del., whose members are mostly Middle Eastern.

FBI spokesman Rich Wolf said Thursday that Mobley had been under investigation for possible terror-related links while living in Newark.

Yemen's defense ministry has described Mobley as "an al-Qaeda member involved in several terrorist attacks" since his arrival there, probably in 2008.

A member of the Delaware mosque who declined to give his name said he last saw Mobley about two years ago. "He said wanted to go to Morocco or Yemen to learn Arabic," the man said. He remembered Mobley as "not at all" militant.

Nehal Aboelmaged, wife of Abdelhadi Shehata, the imam of the Newark mosque, said Thursday that Mobley and his wife and baby daughter moved into the apartment directly below theirs in December 2007. "They kept to themselves," Aboelmaged said in an interview at her home, but "were very friendly, very nice." She said that Mobley's wife, Sabba, brought her dinners when she had difficulty cooking after giving birth.

About six months later, "they said they were moving to New Jersey and that later on Sharif was going to Yemen to learn Arabic," she said.

Mobley's brother-in-law Nasr Abdul Mujeeb said neither he nor his wife, Mobley's sister Charlene, had had any recent contact with him. He declined to comment further.

Earlier yesterday at the West Philadelphia mosque, Anwar Muhaimin's hour-long sermon was interlaced with references to Mobley and the media coverage he called "the sensation around the brother."

"We cannot allow people to implicate our entire community," he said. "We know that on the day of judgment that Allah will hold individuals to account."

Although he declined to speak Mobley's name, he noted that when someone like him goes astray, "the consequences fall on the entire community. Now the whole community becomes tainted," adding that such an inference was unfair. He said that sometimes young and confused adherents to Islam may "go to the worst extremes because some sheikh from overseas says that's what should be done."

"In my opinion these are the religious pimps in the clothes of religious men," he said. "The tragedy of this story is that now a young man has thrown his life away, so that's another person we lose."