Suspected Serial Arson Rampage Alarms Northampton Mass.

Federal, state and local fire and police officials are investigating more than a dozen suspicious fires that occurred early Sunday morning.

The fires all started between 2 and 3:35 a.m. In cars and houses in a residential area of Northampton. A father and his don died in one of those fires.

Firefighters from 14 departments around western Massachusetts were called in to help.

It appears these fires were planned out and coordinated.

And that an arsonist or arsonists are at large in the Pioneer Valley of western Massachusetts.

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Two people were killed early yesterday in one of at least 18 fires set during what the state’s top firefighter called the state’s worst day of arson in memory.

Firefighters responded to the first reported fire around 2 a.m. For the next hour and a half, eight serious blazes – four at homes and four in cars – and at least 10 small fires were set within a few square miles. The most serious gutted a house at 17 Fair St., where two people escaped the flames but two others died.

The victims were not named pending autopsies, but they were identified as Paul Yeskie and his son, Paul Jr., by neighbors and a fire official with direct knowledge of the investigation, speaking anonymously because he was not authorized to discuss specifics.

The fires, set in houses, cars, and garages, were the latest in a string of suspicious fires that have plagued the Ward 3 neighborhood of Northampton for years, neighbors and officials said yesterday.

As more and more emergency calls came in, all the fire equipment in Northampton was quickly put to use. A dozen other cities and towns helped extinguish the fires.

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FBI Arrests al Qaeda Blogger

The FBI has arrested Tarek Mehanna and charged him with lying in an affidavit about his relationship to Daniel J. Maldonado, “a former Methuen resident who was suspected of training at an Al Qaeda terrorist camp to overthrow the Somali government.” Maldonado pled guilty to receiving training from a foreign terrorist organization and is currently serving time in a U.S. federal prison.

The FBI picked up Mehanna, a U.S. citizen, as he was boarding a plane to “start a new job overseas,” the Boston Globe reported.

Mehanna’s family and lawyer claim he is innocent of the charges, but the FBI recorded Mehanna’s phone call in which he admitted to lying to the FBI. Mehanna’s lawyer, J.W. Carney Jr., dismissed Mehanna’s activities as small-time. “If this is the FBI’s idea of a terrorist, they are using a net that is designed to catch minnows instead of sharks,” he told the Globe.

But Dr. Rusty Shackleford at the indispensible Jawa Report notes that Mehanna did more than lie to the FBI. Mehanna was in fact one of several bloggers who incites others to fight jihad overseas and recites the words of al Qaeda ideologues:

Source – Weekly Standard

Boston Globe Reports

Statements that Tarek Mehanna allegedly made to the FBI two years ago in the midst of a terrorism investigation came back to haunt him last weekend, when the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy graduate was arrested as he was about to board a Boston flight to start a new job overseas.

Mehanna, 26, who was living in a sprawling house in Sudbury with his parents, is charged with lying to the FBI in December 2006 when questioned about the whereabouts and activities of Daniel J. Maldonado, a former Methuen resident who was suspected of training at an Al Qaeda terrorist camp to overthrow the Somali government.

An FBI affidavit unsealed in federal court in Boston Monday alleges that Mehanna told agents on Dec. 16, 2006, that he had known Maldonado for three or four years and that when he last spoke to him two weeks earlier, Maldonado was living in a suburb of Alexandria, Egypt, and working for a website.

But Maldonado had actually placed several calls from Somalia to Mehanna’s Sudbury home four days before the FBI interview, urging him to “join him in training for jihad,” the affidavit says.

After Maldonado’s capture a month later, a cooperating witness secretly recorded conversations with Mehanna, who fretted about lying to the FBI, according to the affidavit.

Boston Globe Reports

From the Jawa Report

The al Qaeda supporter and blogger arrested by the FBI earlier this week has been identified as Tarek Mehanna. Mehanna was arrested as he attempted to leave the country on charges that he had lied to the FBI about prior knowledge of another Muslim blogger’s, Daniel “Al-Jughaifi” Maldanado, plans to travel from Egypt to Somalia to join the jihad. Maldanado is now in federal prison after being convicted of receiving specialized weapons training from an al Qaeda linked group in Somalia.

Like clockwork, Mehanna’s family defends him as a nice boy who just completed his graduate work to become a pharmacist. What his family may or may not know is that Mehanna goes by the online handle “Abu Sayaba” and runs the “Iskandari” website which is devoted to promoting the Salafi ideology.

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