CAIRO — Muslim clerics from Al-Azhar, Egypt's premier religious institution, chose the country's top Islamic jurist in a direct and secret ballot on Monday that was the first such vote in six decades.

An official statement by the 24-member Senior Scholars Authority says that it elected Shawki Ibrahim Abdel-Karim, a professor in Islamic jurisprudence, to the post of Grand Mufti. The selection is now expected to be ratified by President Mohammed Morsi, which will make it final.

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Previously, the Grand Mufti was appointed by the president. But after the ouster of longtime president Hosni Mubarak, Egypt's interim military rulers amended Al-Azhar's bylaws.

The election of Abdel-Karim from among three candidates came against a backdrop of heightened political tensions and protests over Morsi's rule. Many expected his powerful backers — the Muslim Brotherhood — to field their own candidate for the job.

"There are sleeping cells inside Al-Azhar and they are waking up," said political analyst Ammar Ali Hassan, referring to Brotherhood-aligned clerics associated with the institution. The selection of new members of the Senior Scholars Authority could provide a chance for the group to gain influence there, he added.

Egypt's newly adopted constitution, drafted by an Islamist-led panel and passed in a public referendum in December, empowered Al-Azhar to review draft laws to see if they violate Shariah, or Islamic law. Liberals and some secular Muslims saw the new powers as moving toward the establishment of a religious state.

The Brotherhood, whose voters put Morsi into power as the country's first democratically elected president, has been charged by the liberal opposition and a broad group of Egyptians of trying to monopolize power. Abdel-Rahman el-Bar, considered the group's top jurist, was among those believed to have contested the election. El-Bar however denied this.

"Egypt is full of highly qualified and knowledgeable men who fit the post," he told The Associated Press.

The Grand Mufti has a variety of tasks in Egypt. He reviews and ratifies death sentences issued by courts. He also is responsible for announcing the dates of the months based on a lunar calendar, which in turn determines when the important Muslim fasting month begins. In response to citizens' requests, he issues religious edicts, known as fatwas, and he gives opinions over government policies.

Abdel-Karim will be the country's 19th Grand Mufti since 1895. He succeeds the moderate Ali Gomaa, who served for eight years.

HANGU, Pakistan — A suicide bomber killed 22 people on Friday in a crowded market outside two mosques in northwest Pakistan, police and hospital officials said.

Two of the dead were policemen.

Forty-eight people were wounded in the attack in a narrow lane in the town of Hangu that houses both a Shiite and a Sunni Muslim mosque.

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Officials said the anti-Taliban Sunni Supreme Council often holds its meetings in the Sunni mosque, which made it a possible target.

But district police chief Muhammad Saeed said that the attack was aimed at Shiites and that Sunni Muslims were unintended victims.

"Most of the dead were moving in and out of the mosques in the marketplace after Friday prayers when the bomb went off," senior police officer Imtiaz Shah said.

Hangu, part of Pakistan's border region with Afghanistan, has been racked by sectarian violence between Sunni and Shiite tribes whose mosques, homes and shops are often close to one another.

Hangu is just a few miles from Parachinar, which has a significant Shiite population against whom hardline Sunni militant groups have launched attacks for years.

No group had claimed responsibility for the attack by late evening. 

Related:

Pakistan's unprecedented winter of attacks

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ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Thousands of protesters marched on Pakistan's capital Monday, promising to establish a local version of Cairo's Tahrir Square in support of a cleric who is demanding a crackdown on corruption and other government reforms.

About 10,000 more assembled to greet the arrival of Muhammad Tahirul Qadri, who has been described by one Western diplomat as a "Pakistani cross between [President Barack] Obama and [the late Ayatollah] Khomeini [who returned from exile to lead the Iranian revolution and who later served as the country's supreme leader]."

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His supporters hope to start a campaign of civil disobedience echoing the occupation of Cairo’s Tahrir Square during the Arab Spring protests of 2011, which ended with dictator Hosni Mubarak being driven from power.

Police erected barriers and blocked off key routes to government offices and embassies ahead of Qadri's arrival. He left Lahore Sunday on a 400-mile "Long March for Saving the State."

The Pakistani-Canadian sufi cleric's his much-hyped, much-debated and much-criticized march reached the outskirts of Islamabad late Monday.

Qadri’s most important — and controversial — demand is for the indefinite postponement of forthcoming national elections until government corruption and inefficiency can be tackled.

Divisive demands
Qadri, 61, believes Pakistan needs administrative transparency along with electoral and other reforms — a diagnosis which has found many supporters.

He wants to delay elections and wants the judges and the generals to be consulted when it comes to creating an interim government.

In a country that has fought hard to complete a major democratic milestone - an elected government will complete its first, full term by mid-March — Qadri’s "Save Pakistan, Not Democracy" ethos is creating a rift between Pakistan’s pragmatists and idealists.

Reuters noted that Qadri had achieved fame since returning to Pakistan from Canada last month:

Qadri says he wants the judiciary to bar corrupt politicians from running for office and that the army could play a role in the formation of a caretaker government to manage the run-up to elections this spring.

Qadri's call has divided Pakistanis. Some see him as a champion of reform ...  Others see Qadri as a possible stooge of the military, which has a history of coups and interfering in elections.

In an interview with The Associated Press, Qadri denied any connection to the military and said his aim is to destroy the current political system in which he contends a few powerful families control the political process. 

"People were waiting for someone to raise a voice for true democracy," he told The AP. "They (the current government) have almost finished their tenure of five years. They have delivered nothing to the people of Pakistan except terrorism, extremism, worsening law and order situation, hunger, poverty, lack of education, lack of health facilities, and unemployment."

The AP added:

A one-time member of parliament, Qadri quit in 2004 over what he says was disgust with the ruling system and moved to Canada in 2006. Since then he spent most of his time in Canada with occasional trips to Pakistan or other countries to promote his agenda.

He earned praise in the West when he came out with a 600-page fatwa in 2010 condemning terrorism, using the same language in the Quran and Islam that militants often use to justify their actions. He's spoken at such institutions as Georgetown University and the United States Institute for Peace, and held rallies in Britain against extremism. 

"No elections after this disastrous government goes home," said supporter Naheed Begum, 50, who was camped out in almost freezing temperatures on Jinnah Avenue. "We will not let one gang of thieves take over from another gang of thieves."

Begum traveled from the northern Pakistani town of Mardan with blankets and dry food rations to attend the rally.

"I’m here with my daughters and my grandchildren. We love to vote, but it it important to change things before we vote."

But Rehman Malik, Pakistan's interior minister, dismissed Qadri's demands. "This government came through an elected process. And so will the next one. Qadri should be warned. He can come, he can camp out, but if he messes around, if he gets violent, I will mess around back, and doubly."

Malik also disputed Qadri’s claims of support. "No one is with Qadri,” he said. “He had promised four million will turn up, and I can’t even count a few thousand [here]."

Shumaisa Rehman, an anchor on one of Pakistan’s private news channels who was reporting on the protests, told NBC News: "It’s got little to do with the numbers. Forget four million. Bring in 20,000 to 30,000 people into a sleepy little capital, and you’ve got a political crisis, whether you like it or not."

Officials warned that intelligence suggested the Taliban may attempt to attack the crowds. However, volunteers from Qadri's own organization, Minhaj ul Quran International, checked participants for weapons.

Reuters and The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Last month, it was cellphones. Before that, it was motorcycles, shawls and jackets. Earlier this year, it was the BBC, Twitter and YouTube. In 2011, it was porn websites. In 2010, it was Facebook. In the 1990s, it was Indian television and musicians with long hair. In the 1980s, it was Salman Rushdie's "Satanic Verses."  And in the 1970s, it was booze.

All banned. In Pakistan. By Pakistan.

Through the decades. Pakistan's state and non-state actors have found a way to regulate, boycott, ban or completely outlaw technology, information, literature, media and even entire communities.

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The result? The Islamic Republic of Pakistan, once imagined as a secular, democratic haven for India's minority Muslim population, may well have become the land of "Banistan."

Babar Sattar, a Harvard-educated lawyer, is one of "Zia's Children" — the generation who grew up during the 1970s and 1980s when the culture of forbiddance took root through ironclad legislation passed by the country's Islamist dictator of the time, Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq.

"The proclivity to ban is the continuing manifestation of expanding religion-driven morality at the expense of personal liberty," Sattar told NBC News. "We don't even recognize that there exists a need not to allow collective outrage or shame to pillage individual rights."

Here's an A to Z of what's been curtailed in "Banistan." 

Alcohol: Pakistan was a pretty wet place until the late premier Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto banned alcohol — days before he was removed by an Islamist general in a coup in 1977. Though a heavy drinker himself, Bhutto's ban was meant to move him closer to the religious margins of the country. The political strategizing didn't work for him (he was executed), but prohibition in Pakistan stuck. Still, booze is available for the connected and the rich.

BlackBerry services: Pakistan's blasphemy laws are regarded as the toughest in the Muslim world. But when hundreds of websites were banned in May 2010 for "blasphemous content'" that was appearing on social networks, Pakistan decided to do away with BlackBerry services, too. 

Cellphones: This year saw Pakistan's  interior minister slam a blanket ban on cellphone services across the country to prevent handsets being used to detonate suicide bombs. On at least two religious occasions in 2012, Eid and Ashura, when terrorist attacks were expected, almost 120 million Pakistanis couldn't use their cellphones, even in case of emergency. 

'Da Vinci Code, The': The screen adaptation for the bestselling "The Da Vinci Code," starring Tom Hanks as the professor who comes across the Jesus Christ/Mary Magdalene union imagined by author Dan Brown, was banned in 2004. 

In Pakistan's largest city, 'Old Glory' is flammable and profitable

Erotica: In 2011, the country's Internet regulator placed a blanket ban on thousands of pornography sites.  Meanwhile, print and DVD/CD formats of porn are available across the country, and the country manages to maintain an underground porn industry.

Food [& Beverages]: As in much of the Muslim world, pork products are banned in Pakistan. But 2012 saw even some "Halal" products boycotted by a lawyers' association in Lahore as well the campus of a major university because they were made by Shezan foods, a brand owned by Pakistan's minority Ahmadi sect. (Ahmadis don't think that Mohammad is Islam's final prophet and have been persecuted by successive Pakistani governments for such ideas.) Other products, including Pepsi, were also boycotted for being "Jewish."

Gambling: Once legal, gambling is now banned (thanks in large part to late prime minister Bhutto's attempts to appease the religious right in the late 1970s). However, Pakistan is a joint capital (with India) of the lucrative illegal cricket betting industry in which millions bet billions, especially when archrivals India and Pakistan play. 

Hair: In his own bid to transform what was left of secular Pakistan after the Islamist Zia regime, the 1990s saw prime minister Nawaz Sharif (tipped to be the next premier in upcoming elections) try to implement selective Shariah law by banning popular rock band, Junoon, and all musicians with long hair. The ban on Junoon was politically inspired, as it had campaigned for the financial accountability of those in elected office.  But it all proved to be rather cosmetic. Rock and roll continued to flourish in Pakistan, and the shutdown only helped Junoon polish off their bad-boy image until they broke up. Meanwhile, Sharif got a hair transplant. The 2000s, however, saw a more complicated and violent hair ban, this time implemented in Pakistan's northwest by Taliban militants, who even bombed and fined barber shops for shaving men.

Pakistan's Generation Y battles to shape country's future

India: The world's largest democracy enjoys a special place in the Islamic Republic's banning regime. Some bans look to be permanent, including all Indian news channels, certain news websites and books, and all printed newspapers and magazines (India reciprocates most of these bans). 

Jokes: Forwarding a joke via text message, email or blog can result in a 14-year prison sentence. But only if it targets the country's leadership. 

Rumors of plot to sterilize Muslims with polio vaccine sparks killings

Kites: The centuries-old spring festival of kite flying, Basant, based out of Pakistan's cultural capital Lahore, was also banned by the Supreme Court in 2005 when petitions were filed highlighting the dangerous after-effects of kite flying, including death by strangulation. The Supreme Court reversed the ban earlier this year.

LGBT rights: Rights for the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community are curbed by social taboos in the Islamic Republic, but Pakistan's laws don't help either. The colonial-era Pakistan Penal Code of 1860, designed by the British, imposes a prison sentence for sodomy. But while lesbians have been low-profile in their run-ins with the law of the land, Pakistani transgenders made history in 2012 by successfully lobbying for a landmark Supreme Court judgment in their favor that allows them to both identify themselves and vote as a third sex -- transgender, and not male or female, as they were forced to in the past.

Minorities: First legally pronounced to be non-Muslims in the 1970s, the persecuted Ahmadi sect was further limited in its actions and exercise of religious freedoms by several laws in the 1980s. They were not allowed to say the Muslim greeting aloud, nor call their houses of worship mosques. Ahmadis continue to be targets of notorious blasphemy laws, under which other religious minorities, particularly Christians, are also targeted. 

Nipples: Customs agents usually redact images of female nipples from foreign publications available on local newsstands. Bottoms usually are overlooked, but full-frontal nudity is not.

Osama: As the embarrassment of Operation Neptune Spear set in after May 2011, Pakistani authorities first cordoned off Bin Laden's Abbottabad compound, then forbade foreigners in Abbottabad, then forbade non-Abottabadis in Abbotabad, then forbade all and sundry from visiting the location. Finally, they just razed the building.

Parties: According to the regulators of the largest housing authority in Pakistan's largest city, "Marriages Ceremony," "Dance Party," and "Musical Evenings" are not allowed for citizens inside their own homes. However, "Birthday Party" and "Quran Khwani / Dars" (Quran recitals and religious lectures) are. 

Quran burning: Pakistan's blasphemy laws, considered the toughest in the Islamic world, carry a potential death sentence for anyone insulting Islam. When a Christian teenage girl with limited learning abilities was accused of burning and desecrating the Quran, riots and controversy followed as the case of young Rimsha, initially charged with blasphemy, developed into a complicated legal battle. But it soon became became evident that an imam, who wanted Christians like Rimsha out of his neighborhood, had planted evidence on her. 

For many Pakistanis, 'USA' means 'drones'

Raymond Davis (along with other intelligence contractors and diplomats): When CIA contractor Raymond Davis shot and killed two petty criminals in broad daylight in Lahore in January 2011, the anti-American uproar was so severe that the United States had to dispatch its best diplomats, including John Kerry, to negotiate his release. And although Davis was let go only through the traditional Islamic method of payment of blood money to the victims' relatives, Pakistan subsequently clamped down on the movement and deployment of all Western diplomats, officials and contractors. Today, if you work for the U.S., or the Argentinian, or the Jamaican embassy, you will have to obtain a "No Objection Certificate" to attend a dinner if it's even one town over from where you are stationed.

Social media: With almost 20 million Internet connections that reach even deep inside the volatile tribal areas adjoining Afghanistan, Pakistani authorities have tried in vain to regulate social media. And although Facebook recently shut down a page used for recruiting by the Pakistani Taliban, the government has never directly acted to disconnect those who support terror via social networks. 

Shawls: In what was dubbed by the national press as the most desperate of recently taken security measures, a district in Pakistan's northwest actually banned coats and shawls, even in the dead of winter, under British colonial-era law designed for maintaining public discipline and security. The reason: their possible use to hide suicide jackets under the bulky clothing during a sensitive religious holiday.

Can social media propel 'rock star' politician Imran Khan to power in Pakistan?

Urinating: The absence of public toilets across the country, as well as the spread and social acceptance of a rural 'go anywhere' culture has created a messy challenge for government after government in Pakistan: how to stop millions from answering the call of nature when and where they please. The answer? A national ban, with threat of prosecution.

Vaccinations: Days before 161,000 children were about to inoculated for polio this summer, the Taliban banned the vaccination campaign. Even though Pakistan remains one of the three countries in the world that still carries the debilitating virus, militants continue to target and kill anti-polio campaigners, claiming that the program is a U.S. cover for espionage, similar to the CIA using a Pakistani physician to help locate Osama bin Laden in Abbotabad last year. 

Weddings: Forget the five-course wedding dinner. Pakistan -- once the land of extravagant, multi-event weddings -- has a law that doesn't allow for more than one entrée at a wedding feast. The policy has been in place for several years but is only now being implemented earnestly by a provincial government that is focused on battling food wastage. 

More Pakistan coverage from NBC News

XXX: As porn is outlawed in Pakistan, "Tripple" is the code word nationally accepted for under-the-counter DVD and magazine purchases that are naughtier than usual.

YouTube: YouTube is the only social networking site that continues to be blanket-banned in Pakistan since its owner, Google Inc., refused to block an anti-Islamic video last September. But Vimeo, YouTube's competitor network that offers similarly "blasphemous" material, remains rather functional and legal in Pakistani cyberspace.

'Zero Dark Thirty': Though the new Kathryn Bigelow thriller is out, it probably won't be seen in a cinema near you in Pakistan. No theater has promoted the film, no television channel is carrying its trailers, and, so far, no DVD shops are selling even its pirated versions. The reason? Well, one guess. ... "Zero Dark Thirty" is military speak for 12.30 a.m., the time the Abbotabad raid targeting bin Laden commenced in May 2011.

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Attackers threw a homemade bomb at an administration building belonging to the Egyptian Coptic church in Dafniya, close to the western city of Misrata, said Ibrahim Rajab of the Misrata military council.

The Egyptian consul in the city, Tareq Dahrouj, said he visited the church and the building where the two church workers were killed early on Sunday.

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"The explosion seems like it was very strong and I have started making my investigations with Misrata officials,'' he said.Libya has small communities of Egyptians, Greeks and Italians who account for most of the Christian minority in the predominantly Islamic country.

Libya's new rulers have struggled to impose their authority on myriad armed groups who helped oust dictator Moammar Gadhafi last year but have yet to lay down their arms. Sunday's attack was the first major assault on a Christian target since the revolution.

Coptic Christians in Egypt have become increasingly worried after an upsurge in attacks on churches, which they blame on hardline Islamists, in the wake of the removal from office in 2011 of President Hosni Mubarak.

Repeated attacks on foreign diplomatic and aid centers in Libya's eastern city of Benghazi have made it very dangerous for non-locals to work and live there.

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The worst attack on a foreign target was on Sept. 11, when the U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens and three embassy staff were killed in an attack on the U.S. mission in Benghazi.

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Morsi's leftist, liberal, secularist and Christian opponents had taken to the streets to block what they argued was a move to ram through a charter that would dangerously mix politics and religion.

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The president argues that the new constitution offers sufficient protection for minorities, and adopting it quickly is necessary to end two years of turmoil and political uncertainty that has wrecked the economy. 

Hours before the vote result was announced, the authorities imposed a new ban on travelling in or out of the country with more than $10,000 in foreign currency, a move apparently intended to halt capital flight. 

Some Egyptians have begun withdrawing their savings from banks in fear of tougher restrictions. 

The "yes" vote paves the way for a parliamentary election in about two months, setting the stage for yet another electoral battle between surging Islamists and their fractious liberal and leftist opponents. 

The final result, announced by the election commission, matched — to the last decimal place — an earlier unofficial tally announced by Morsi's Muslim Brotherhood. 

The constitution was drawn up by a body largely made up of Morsi's Islamist allies. The results announcement was a disappointment for the opposition which had put pressure on the authorities to recount the result to reflect what they have described as major vote violations. 

"We have seriously investigated all the complaints," judge Samir Abu el-Matti of the Supreme Election Committee told a news conference. The final official turnout was 32.9 percent. 

Cairo, gripped by often violent protests in the run-up to the vote, appeared calm after the announcement and opposition groups have announced no plans for demonstrations to mark the result. 

"The results was so odd and no change in the percentage points shows that nothing was done to take our complaints into account," Khaled Dawood, an opposition spokesman, said. 

The referendum, held on December 15 and on December 22, has sown deep divisions in the Arab world's most populous nation but Morsi says enacting the new constitution quickly will bring stability and a chance to focus on fixing the economy. 

A growing sense of crisis has gripped Egypt's polarized society for weeks. Standard and Poor's cut Egypt's long-term credit rating on Monday. 

Hours ahead of the results announcement, Prime Minister Hisham Kandil told the nation of 83 million the government was committed to taking steps to heal the economy. 

"The main goals that the government is working towards now is plugging the budget deficit, and working on increasing growth to boost employment rates, curb inflation, and increase the competitiveness of Egyptian exports," he said. 

Crisis mode
The central bank said on Monday it would take steps to "safeguard" bank deposits, without giving any details. Rumors are rife of what sort of measures are planned. 

"I have been hearing that the central bank is going to take over all our bank deposits to pay wages for government employees given the current deteriorating economic situation," said Ayman Osama, father of two young children. 

He said he had taken out the equivalent of about $16,000 from his account this week and planned to withdraw more, adding that he had also told his wife to buy more gold jewellery. 

"I am not going to put any more money in the bank and neither will many of the people I know," he said. 

The referendum is the Islamists' third electoral victory since the fall of Mubarak, following parliamentary and presidential elections, representing a decisive shift in a country at the heart of the Arab world, where Morsi's Muslim Brotherhood was suppressed for generations by military rulers. 

However, secularist and liberal opposition members hope they can organize better in time for the next parliamentary vote. 

The opposition says the constitution fails to guarantee personal freedoms and rights for women and minorities. The government says the criticism is misplaced. 

Hossam El-Din Ali, a 35-year-old newspaper vendor in central Cairo, said he agreed the new constitution would help bring some political stability but like many others he feared the possible economic austerity measures lying ahead. 

"People don't want higher prices. People are upset about this," he said. "There is recession, things are not moving. But I am wishing for the best, God willing." 

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When the flight from London landed in Philadelphia on Oct. 15, 2009, the pilot asked everyone to stay seated. A passenger was ill, he explained, and paramedics needed the aisles clear.

It didn't take long for passengers to realize the ruse. Federal agents entered the plane and made straight for the short woman in a full burka.

Colleen LaRose, the woman who called herself Jihad Jane, didn't resist when they handcuffed her.

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FBI agents drove her to their offices two blocks from Independence Hall. When she complained of a headache, they gave her three Tylenol and a Sprite. Then they asked her to tell her story.

LaRose, a former teenage prostitute with a heavy history of drug abuse, mangled some facts. But mostly, she told the truth:

She became intrigued by Islam after a one-night stand with a Muslim man in 2007. She converted a short while later and became radicalized watching YouTube videos of atrocities against Palestinian children.

Online, she met a man who called himself Eagle Eye and who claimed to work for al-Qaida. Eagle Eye convinced her that she could travel to Sweden and use her appearance -- her white skin and her blonde hair -- to blend in. That way, she could get close enough to assassinate Lars Vilks, a Swedish artist who had blasphemed the Prophet Mohammad by drawing his head on a dog.

Agents asked her why she had returned to the United States. LaRose, 46, said she had been concerned about her mother. When she talked with her Pennsylvania boyfriend on the phone, he had said her mother was deathly ill. Not true, an agent assured her. Her mother was fine. It had been a trick intended to get LaRose back to the United States.

Did you give up your jihad because you got scared? an agent asked.

No, LaRose insisted. She gave up, she said, because Eagle Eye's men in Holland and Ireland moved too slowly. She felt "let down," she told the agents.

During her initial interviews, she didn't tell the agents that she also felt homesick. Or that, even as her host in Ireland -- the man who called himself Black Flag -- had driven her to the airport, she had feared she might be killed because she knew too much.

One agent pressed. Are you sure you didn't abandon the jihad because you got cold feet?

No, she insisted. And if they let her go, she told them, she planned a suicide attack against U.S. soldiers in Iraq or Afghanistan.

The agents asked about Jamie Paulin Ramirez, another blonde American woman who had travelled to Europe with her son. LaRose said she lived with her briefly in Ireland but didn't know much about her.

The agents also asked about a U.S. passport they found in LaRose's luggage. It belonged to the Pennsylvania boyfriend. But it was expired. Where, an agent asked, was the valid one?

LaRose knew the answer: For safekeeping, she had mailed it months earlier to the youngest member of the conspiracy, a high school junior in Maryland named Mohammed Hassan Khalid.

She didn't give Khalid up. Instead, she lowered her eyes and asked for a lawyer.

The FBI kept her arrest quiet as they checked out her story.

'Sex slave'
About a week after LaRose's arrest in Philadelphia, Ramirez, the other blonde American woman, sat before a laptop in a southern Ireland apartment and let her emotions flow.

"I wish I was never stupid enough to come here," Ramirez typed in a note to herself.

A recent Muslim convert, Ramirez, 31, had arrived just six weeks earlier with her young son. On the very day they landed, she married Ali Damache, the man others knew as Black Flag.

He had wooed her by promising to teach her Arabic and Islam. But his lessons ended soon after they mastered the alphabet and a few basic prayers. He rarely spoke with her, except to bark orders about cooking and cleaning. She wanted to be a good Muslim wife, but if he wouldn't help her, how could she?

"This man has no intentions to make this relationship work, ever," she wrote.

"I am just a sex slave to him," she concluded. And later, she wrote: "… I cry because I always wanted a person in my life who could love me for who I am."

Ramirez felt trapped, afraid that if she returned to the United States her estranged mother might try to wrest custody of her son. Still, she took tentative steps to try to leave. When her husband was away, she began reconnecting by email with friends and family in Colorado.

Then in January, she learned she was pregnant by Damache. How could she possibly leave now?

Irish police answered the question two months later. On the morning of March 9, 2010, police raided the small flat in Waterford, detaining Ramirez, Damache and five of his associates for questioning. Later, Ramirez was whisked past a mob of journalists and into a closed courtroom. There, she stood before a judge for a brief session, bewildered beneath her burka.

During questioning, she told the detectives what she knew, which turned out not to be much. She had come to Ireland to live with this man; he spoke of jihad but she couldn't offer specifics -- in part because Damache had never offered any himself.

Damache refused to cooperate. In fact, he played coy with the police, deflecting questions by posing his own. He almost seemed to relish the interrogation.

The discovery
Hours after the raids in Ireland, the FBI announced terrorism charges against LaRose, who remained in custody in the United States. U.S. officials called her by the online name she had chosen, Jihad Jane, and the story would lead the network news.

Near Baltimore, LaRose's teenage accomplice, Mohammed H. Khalid, found the indictment online. He had known the FBI was after LaRose, but he hadn't heard from her in seven months, since shortly after she had arrived in Ireland.

Now, he read the government's statement on the case:

"LaRose -- an American citizen whose appearance was considered to be an asset because it allowed her to blend in --  is charged with using the Internet to recruit violent jihadist fighters and supporters, and to solicit passports and funding," U.S. Attorney Michael Levy said in his statement. "It demonstrates yet another very real danger lurking on the Internet. This case also demonstrates that terrorists are looking for Americans to join them in their cause, and it shatters any lingering thought that we can spot a terrorist based on appearance."

Scanning the indictment, Khalid came to paragraph 18. It cited an unnamed co-conspirator and quoted excerpts from online posts that Khalid recognized.

He had sent them.

Not long after, FBI agents arrived at his parents' small apartment in Ellicott City, Md. They carried a search warrant. As some of the agents began rifling through the family's possessions, others took the teen into his bedroom.

"Tell us about it," one of the agents said to Khalid, who had turned 16. "There's no benefit in lying."

The FBI agents later showed Khalid lengthy transcripts of his chats in jihadi forums. They explained that LaRose was a former prostitute and drug addict. They told Khalid that everyone in the plot had turned on him. They told him that he would be smart to cooperate. They were, they said, the only friends he had left.

Khalid believed the agents when they said he was in big trouble. So he told them that he was no longer a jihadist. The people in those forums were misguided, he said. He had reformed.

The agents asked about the passports. LaRose had mailed them to Khalid before she left for Europe. Although he had sent one of the passports to Damache in Ireland, he had hidden the other at his school, he told the FBI. Now he claimed they were missing.

During the next few weeks, the boy met with agents a half dozen times, without a parent or attorney present. He believed he was a witness, not a suspect.

By then, Khalid had already acceded to his parents' wishes to seek counseling. A local Muslim scholar was teaching him that he was misinterpreting the Quran, and Khalid also met regularly with an imam who preached peace. He stopped posting on his blog. But it was all a front.

Khalid continued to live a double life, assembling a strong resume for college applications while secretly translating jihadi videos. He entered two high school writing contests. For one, he chose as a subject the Dalai Lama. For the other, Malcolm X.

The arrest
Months passed without any public word on the case, and that fall, Khalid began his senior year of high school.

In October, he aced the SAT college entrance exam and submitted an early decision application to prestigious Johns Hopkins University. By now, he had bought another laptop. He also found ways to sneak back into jihadi forums.

His writing turned darker.

That fall, Khalid struck up an online friendship with a troubled, 21-year-old neo-Nazi-turned-jihadist who lived in the Pittsburgh area.

During an online chat on Nov. 22, Khalid told the man that he had daydreamed about "doing martyrdom operations together in my school."

"Like Columbine?" the man asked.

"Na'am," Khalid said, using the Arabic word for yes. "It was like we both were in a big truck and had guns and we were shooting randomly at a huge crowd of kids. Subhan'Allah how great would it be. I live in Maryland … and the kids who study in my school proudly state that their parents work in NSA and FBI."

A few weeks after that exchange, news arrived inside a fat envelope.

"Congratulations!" began the letter from Johns Hopkins. Not only had Khalid won early admission but the school offered a full ride -- a $54,000 scholarship. It was quite an achievement for any student, let alone an immigrant who spent high school feeling alienated.

In June 2011, Khalid graduated from high school. A month later, while still 17, FBI agents quietly arrested him.

Why they chose then, months before he legally became an adult and months after his reference to Columbine, remains unclear. But that fall, shortly after his 18th birthday, the government indicted Khalid for his role in the Jihad Jane case.

The teenager became the youngest person to face U.S. terrorism charges.

The future
Three years have passed since Jihad Jane's arrest. And despite the guilty pleas by LaRose, Ramirez and Khalid, the Jihad Jane conspirators still await sentencing.

All confessed to conspiracy to provide material support to terrorists. LaRose also pleaded guilty to conspiracy to kill in a foreign country, lying to the FBI and attempted identity theft --  for stealing her boyfriend's passports.

The long delay in sentencing can be attributed to several factors: a continuing FBI investigation, extended psychological evaluations of some defendants, a government filing indicating that some evidence in the case is classified, and unexpected legal maneuvers in Ireland.

Ali Damache, the man who called himself Black Flag, caused a sensation in Irish legal circles by successfully contesting the police search of his Waterford apartment.

U.S. prosecutors have indicted him on terrorism charges and have asked Irish authorities to extradite him. Today, he remains in Ireland, awaiting trial on charges unrelated to the Jihad Jane conspiracy. His lawyers declined to comment.

The five acquaintances detained with Ramirez and Damache were released without facing any terrorism charges.

U.S. authorities won't say if they know the whereabouts of Eagle Eye, the al-Qaeda operative who instructed LaRose to kill, or Abdullah, the man who was supposed to train her in Amsterdam.

In U.S. District Court, sentencing for LaRose, Ramirez and Khalid has been postponed a handful of times. The most recent dates set: Ramirez and Khalid for early next year, and LaRose for May 7.

Until then, the three remain locked in the same federal prison in downtown Philadelphia, cut off from each other and from the tool that brought them together -- the World Wide Web.

LaRose has been held in solitary confinement for three years; even so, on rare outings, she says she has caught glimpses of Ramirez, though the two women haven't spoken.

Ramirez, who miscarried the baby she conceived with Damache, may face the shortest sentence of the three. Her crime: traveling to Ireland to meet Damache with a vague promise to live and train with jihadists. Authorities say she never knew about the plot to kill Vilks. Her young son now lives with her mother in Colorado.

"I'm not saying that I like being in prison but I am very grateful for this time to be able to reflect and study," Ramirez says in a statement provided by her court-appointed lawyer, Jeremy H. Gonzalez Ibrahim. "I was a parakeet. I just repeated what other people said."

Khalid's admission to Johns Hopkins was rescinded. His court-appointed lawyer, Jeffrey M. Lindy, says his client now realizes that his virtual friends did not love him the way his parents and teachers did. He also says Khalid regrets translating videos that may have led others astray.

"If you take away Jihad Jane and the ridiculous plan to kill the cartoonist" Vilks, says Lindy, "what you have is a teenager becoming fascinated with and learning about and adopting a radical ideology."

The lead prosecutor in the Jihad Jane conspiracy, Assistant U.S. Attorney Jennifer Arbittier Williams, says she cannot comment on the cases until after sentencing. But FBI officials in Philadelphia emphasize that they cannot afford to discount possible terrorism suspects, no matter how incompetent or intelligent they might seem.

Once a plot matures, they say, authorities might be too late to stop an attack.

"The more sophisticated that capability becomes, we may not be able to control the outcome," said Richard P. Quinn, the FBI's assistant special agent in charge for counterterrorism. "If you get shot by someone with a seventh-grade education versus someone with a Harvard education, does it matter?"

'My destiny'
During an exclusive interview from jail, LaRose says she still believes that Islam saved her.

"I survived a lot of things that should have rightfully killed me," she says of drug use, rape and incest. "I also thought there was a purpose for me to be alive and then when I found Islam, I thought… ‘This is why I have lived so long.'"

U.S. sentencing guidelines suggest LaRose could be jailed for 30 years to life.

Her intended victim, the Swedish artist Lars Vilks, says he believes LaRose has served enough time already.

"They should let her go," Vilks says. "Now that she is known, they can keep an eye on her."

Ollie Avery Mannino, the counselor who helped LaRose confront her father about childhood rapes three decades ago, also urges leniency.

Mannino says LaRose's harrowing past doesn't excuse her conduct as an aspiring terrorist. "But when you think about punishment, you have to consider the whole person," Mannino says.

"I don't want people to have sympathy for Colleen," she says. "I want them to try empathy."

Today, in jail, LaRose expresses few regrets. "I did everything I did for the love of my ummah", the Muslim community, she says. "Whatever happens to me, it's my destiny. Whatever time they give me, it's already predestined for me. So I'm not worried."

With limited access to media in prison, LaRose says she hadn't heard that the U.S. government held up her case as one that "underscores the evolving nature of violent extremism" and demonstrates a "very real danger lurking on the Internet."

LaRose also hadn't realized that her arrest caused so much buzz back in 2009 -- that Katie Couric had opened the CBS Evening News with her story, declaring that prosecutors were warning that this "petite woman from the Philadelphia suburbs" now "represents the new face of terrorism."

"Wow," LaRose says, almost tickled by the characterization. Then, after a momentary pause: "Well, they're right."

Confined to a cell, often for 23 hours a day, LaRose has nonetheless found a new path toward love.

Read previous installments

Part 1: From abuse victim to terrorist wannabe

Part 2: A vow is confirmed; a terror plot grows

Part 3: The FBI visits; plot's wheels set in motion

She has discovered a makeshift Internet that exists within the walls of the federal prison in Philadelphia: If she scoops enough water from her toilet bowl, LaRose can communicate with other inmates by speaking through the sewer pipes -- they call it "talking on the bowls."

By talking on the bowls, LaRose fell for a new man. She knows little about him other than what he has told her. But she finds him wise, compassionate and righteous. He is not a Muslim but promises to convert when he gets out. That way, they can marry and be happy.

Colleen LaRose believes him.

More from Open Channel:

 

'Jane's' jihad: The FBI visits, a murder plot's wheels are set in motion

'Jane's' jihad: A vow is confirmed, a terror plot grows

Senior al-Qaida leader killed in Pakistan by drone, jihadis, US officials say

Adelson, other big super PAC donors continued spending in race's final days

Secret Service says it lost two computer backup tapes in 2008

'Jihad Jane' begins strange journey from abuse victim to wannabe terrorist

Gang tactic -- shared 'community guns' -- challenges police, prosecutors

New device lets crooks crack many hotel locks

 

 

Follow Open Channel from NBCNews.com on Twitter and Facebook

 

 

 

 

 

Colleen LaRose answered the door of her duplex near Philadelphia to find an FBI agent standing on the porch. 

He had questions about her interest in Islamic websites.

For LaRose, whose online name was Jihad Jane, it was the second time the FBI had questioned her that summer. Weeks earlier, she'd spoken with an agent by phone and offered a series of lame lies: She had denied any interest in jihadist forums, denied wiring money overseas, denied that she went by Jihad Jane.

This time, on Aug. 21, 2009, LaRose lied less.

---

Yes, she visited Muslims websites, she said. As a recent convert to Islam, she wanted to learn as much as possible. Yeah, she said, maybe her political views had angered others online. But she denied raising money for al-Qaida or having any connection with extremists.

Lying to the FBI is a crime, the agent told her.

OK, she said.

Then he asked if she planned to travel to Holland.

She was thinking about it, she told the agent, but there had been a death in the family -- a heart attack had just taken her boyfriend's father. His funeral was the next day.

When the agent asked for a way to keep in touch, LaRose gave him her cell number. Call anytime next week, she told him.

A day later, LaRose attended the funeral. The day after the service, Aug. 23, she pulled the hard drive from her computer and stashed it in a box. She gathered $2,000 in cash and packed three suitcases. With a bargain plane ticket to Amsterdam in hand, LaRose persuaded an acquaintance to drive her to the airport.

She was moving ahead with the plan conceived by the al-Qaeda operative in Pakistan, the man she knew only as Eagle Eye. Already, she had pledged to kill the Swedish artist Lars Vilks. He had blasphemed Islam by drawing the Prophet Mohammad's head on a dog.

As she headed to Europe with plans to murder in the name of Allah, LaRose left her boyfriend and mother with the impression she was running a quick errand.

Mary Richards
Landing in Amsterdam, Colleen LaRose felt euphoric. She had shed her old life -- 46 years scarred by rapes, prostitution, drugs and failed marriages -- for this new one full of promise.

At the airport, LaRose donned a full burka for the first time. More firsts awaited: She would meet her first jihadist, enter her first mosque and learn how to pray.

She gave the taxi driver the name of the mosque, and as the cab pulled away from the airport, a song from childhood popped into her head.

“Who can turn the world on with her smile? Who can take a nothing day, and suddenly make it all seem worthwhile?”

It was the theme from the 1970s TV series, "The Mary Tyler Moore Show." LaRose imagined herself as the lead character, Mary Richards. If she had been wearing a hat instead of a burka, LaRose thought, she would have stepped from the cab with a huge smile and acted out the show's classic opening, twirling around and tossing her hat in the air.

“Well, it's you girl and you should know it!

“With every glance and every little movement, you show it …

“You're gonna make it after all. ...”

When the taxi driver found the mosque, no one was waiting for LaRose. For nearly an hour, she stood outside in a full hijab with her luggage. Then it began to rain.

Finally, another Muslim woman arrived and took LaRose to see her contact, a man named Abdullah. LaRose had expected him to introduce her to fellow jihadists, to train her for her mission, to teach her the ways of Islam.

None of that happened. Now that LaRose had actually arrived and it was time for action, Abdullah the terrorist was suddenly hedging, dodging, equivocating, pleading for patience.

Two weeks into her visit to Amsterdam, LaRose concluded that Abdullah was a poseur. It was time for her to leave, she told him, and Abdullah quickly agreed. He suggested that she visit his associate in Waterford, Ireland, the man who called himself Black Flag.

LaRose packed her bags.

Calling 911

Back in the United States, one of LaRose's most trusted allies was struggling, too.

Mohammed Hassan Khalid had lost access to his primary weapon of jihad: his computer. His parents took it away.

It happened a few weeks into the boy's junior year in high school, after Khalid's parents confronted him about the long stretches he spent alone in his bedroom with his laptop. They suspected he was trolling for porn.

When Khalid refused to explain what he was doing, his parents grabbed his computer. Khalid threw a tantrum but they wouldn't give it back.

Then, this aspiring jihadist, who knew that his friend LaRose had twice been visited by the FBI, made an odd and impulsive choice: He dialed 911 and invited law enforcement into his home. His parents, he told the dispatcher, were abusive.

When police arrived, the officers backed the parents. Only after authorities left and Khalid gave his parents his password would they begin clicking through his computer. They discovered his al-Qaida translation projects and jihadi videos.

As the teenager later wrote to a friend, they "saw the beheadings, which scared the crap out of them."

Stripped of access to his online life, Khalid soon became despondent. He refused to eat. He slept all day. After a few days, his parents dialed 911 themselves and had Khalid admitted overnight to a psychiatric facility.

The boy told no one about Eagle Eye, Jihad Jane, Black Flag, or the stolen passports LaRose had sent him for safekeeping - including the one he had forwarded to Black Flag in Ireland.

‘No matter the risk’
Waterford seems an unlikely place to launch a jihad.

Founded by Vikings and renowned for its crystal, the southern Irish city is far more tranquil than Dublin or Cork. Only a few hundred Muslims live there, many who immigrated for jobs at the regional hospital. To create a mosque, local Muslims converted a suburban home near the hospital.

Yet the city became the confluence of the Jihad Jane conspiracy. Here, in September 2009, Black Flag met his two prized recruits in person for the first time: LaRose and Jamie Paulin Ramirez, the lonely Colorado woman whom he had persuaded to come by telling her that Allah had willed it in a dream.

Both women were Americans -- white, blonde and recent converts to Islam. And though they had often chatted online, neither knew that the other was coming.

Short but thin and handsome, Black Flag was known in Waterford by his given name, Ali Damache. Born in Algeria in 1965, Damache grew up in central France. After high school, he sold perfume and cosmetics in the women's section of a Paris department store for many years. Around 2001, he moved to southern Ireland.

Damache bounced from sales job to sales job -- he worked at a drug store, a telephone call center, a real estate agency and an insurance firm. To comply with Irish welfare and immigration law, each time he lost a job he enrolled in computer-training programs, giving him access to computers and a reason to spend a lot of time online.

He wed an Irish Catholic woman, a marriage that lasted about seven years. In 2007, Damache began regularly going to mosque and, about a year later, wearing Muslim attire.

By 2009, Damache was calling himself Black Flag. Online, he made contact with Eagle Eye, LaRose, Ramirez, Khalid, Abdullah and others whom the FBI has linked to al-Qaida cells.

Throughout the summer, even after LaRose tipped him that the FBI was watching, Damache continued to send online messages that U.S. authorities say place him at the hub of the conspiracy.

"The job is to knock down some individuals that are harming Islam," Damache explained to a friend in Europe. He was busy building "an organization," he wrote, divided into a "planning team … research team … action team … recruitment team … finance team."

Damache wrote breathlessly of his plans for LaRose. "We have already organized everything for her. We are wil(ing)l to die in order to protect her no matter what the risk."

‘So close'
LaRose and Ramirez each landed in Ireland within days of the other, during the second week of September. On the day she arrived, Ramirez married Damache.

There would be no honeymoon.

Instead, with Ramirez's young son, they all stayed in a one-bedroom apartment Damache rented in the heart of Waterford. The flat stood steps from upscale Italian and Chinese restaurants and the city archives, on a neat, narrow street close to the central shopping mall, riverfront and Catholic church.

The sleeping arrangements proved awkward. At times, the women stayed with the boy in the living room; Damache took the bedroom for himself.

Despite the unorthodox accommodations, LaRose remained committed to the notion of killing the Swedish artist. With little direction, she was doing what she could, tracking her target the only way she knew how: online.

To try to learn more about Vilks, for example, she signed up for a virtual community he had created. Filling out the online form, LaRose typed a false name - - Sally Jones -- and created a new Gmail account.

She also left a clue that underscored her sloppiness. In the postal code section of the online form, she typed 48174 -- the zip code for Romulus, Mich., her childhood home.

Damache gave LaRose a key to the Waterford apartment, and she was free to come and go. Ramirez focused on supporting her new husband's activities, whatever they were. She didn't get a key and was instructed to remain at home, to cook and to clean.

Local Muslim women took LaRose to the mosque and taught her how to pray. The first time she rose after praying, LaRose experienced what she believed to be a minor miracle. A persistent pain in her stomach, one that had bothered her for years, simply vanished. LaRose was astonished. What more proof did she need that Islam could heal her?

Her faith in the jihad was another story. In the weeks that followed, nothing materialized the way Damache had promised. No training, no planning, no brothers and sisters waiting to join her in assassination. To LaRose, the great Black Flag seemed nearly as unmoored as she was -- chronically unemployed, spouting verses from the Quran to justify whatever he chose to do, hiding his cowardice behind his beard.

LaRose still refused to give up her jihad. On the last day of September, she emailed Eagle Eye to let him know she remained on task and that it would be "an honor & great pleasure to kill" the artist.

"Only death will stop me here," LaRose wrote. "I am so close to the target!"

She hadn't trained as an assassin and she hadn't traveled to Sweden. But she was back on Muslima.com, the Islamic dating site, hoping to find someone who might put her up in Sweden  -- should she ever get there.

The epiphany
Two weeks after promising that "only death" would stop her plans to kill for Allah, Jihad Jane decided to head home.

The epiphany came while she waited with a Muslim woman in a delivery truck outside a grocery in Waterford. The two women were covered head to toe. Only their eyes showed. The woman's husband was inside shopping.

Sitting in the truck, LaRose considered the woman's life. She had a husband, children, a family and a bond with Allah. The woman seemed happy, LaRose thought. And she wanted that sort of happiness, too.

LaRose considered Damache and Abdullah again. Online, the men were aggressive, tough-talking jihadists, romantic, almost heroic. In person - - in reality - they were tentative, chauvinistic and, perhaps most telling, hobbled by pedestrian struggles like finding enough cash to pay the electric bill.

LaRose asked the woman waiting with her in the truck what she thought of Damache. The woman replied that her husband believed LaRose was a lost soul and that Damache had misled her. Perhaps Vilks, the Swedish artist, did deserve to die, but that was up to Allah, not Damache, to decide, she said.

The woman and her husband were the first Muslims LaRose had met who did not advocate violence. They were wonderful, deeply religious people, and they held a starkly different version of Islam than the likes of Eagle Eye and Black Flag.

LaRose considered all this, sitting in the truck. Again, she felt torn. She wanted to please Eagle Eye, but nothing, not a single thing she had been promised, had worked out.

She was also growing lonely and missed her longtime boyfriend back in Pennsylvania. She wondered who was caring for her elderly mother. She thought about her cats, Fluffy and Klaus.

Jihad Jane was homesick.

She emailed her boyfriend with her new Irish mobile number. A short while later, he called. Come home, he urged. Your mother is ill, near death.

Today, LaRose insists that she wasn't abandoning her jihad, only pausing to visit a sick relative.

If so, what this budding terrorist did next is perplexing: She visited the FBI's website, located the send-a-tip section and let agents know she was heading home.

Read previous installments

Part 1: From abuse victim to terrorist wannabe

Part 2: A vow is confirmed; a terror plot grows

The reason? She hoped the FBI would pay for her flight.

When LaRose got no response, she called her boyfriend back and he bought her ticket.

Damache tried to talk her out of leaving. He pleaded for patience, but LaRose insisted she needed to return to care for her sick mother.

LaRose said goodbye to Ramirez and her son, and reluctantly, Damache agreed to drive her to the airport in Cork. It was a two-hour trip along scenic and often rural roads.

Unannounced, Damache brought a husky friend along for the ride, a man LaRose had never met.

As the car left Waterford, LaRose grew suspicious. They were never going to let her go back to the United States, she thought. She knew too much  -- where they lived, what they were planning, everything.

They weren't driving her to the airport, she thought. It was all a setup.

They were going to make Jihad Jane disappear.

Read Part 4: ‘It's my destiny'

More from Open Channel:

 

• 'Jane's' jihad: A vow is confirmed, a terror plot grows
• Senior al-Qaida leader killed in Pakistan by drone, jihadis, US officials say
• Adelson, other big super PAC donors continued spending in race's final days
• Secret Service says it lost two computer backup tapes in 2008
• 'Jihad Jane' begins strange journey from abuse victim to wannabe terrorist
• Gang tactic -- shared 'community guns' -- challenges police, prosecutors
• New device lets crooks crack many hotel locks

 

 

Follow Open Channel from NBCNews.com on Twitter and Facebook

 

 

Colleen LaRose, the middle-aged American woman who called herself Jihad Jane, hurried to the computer in her duplex near Philadelphia -- the place where she had spent months entertaining murder.

Minutes earlier, an FBI agent had left a card on her door, requesting a call, and LaRose had known precisely what to do. She emailed her al-Qaida handler for advice.

It was July 17, 2009, and almost four months had passed since LaRose had agreed to kill in the name of Allah. Now, the FBI left a calling card on her doorstep. How had they found her? And what did they know?

Her al-Qaida handler, Eagle Eye, lived in Pakistan. He was wise. He was pious. He would guide her.

---

LaRose, now 46, had never seen his face, but during online chats, he had seen hers. Her blonde hair, fair skin and green eyes made her a prized recruit, especially for the undertaking Eagle Eye had ordered. She would blend in nicely, avoiding suspicion. Eagle Eye's plot called for her to travel to Sweden and murder Lars Vilks, the artist who had blasphemed the Prophet Mohammad.

When LaRose reached Eagle Eye, he told her to call the agent back. Find out how much the FBI knows, he said.

Obediently, LaRose dialed the number. The agent picked up.

Have you ever visited extremist Islamic forums? he asked.

No, never, she lied.

Have you ever solicited money for terrorists?

No. Another lie.

Do you know anyone who goes by the online name Jihad Jane?

No, LaRose said.

The call didn't last long, and the FBI agent didn't reveal much. She couldn't tell if the FBI had seen her YouTube posts supporting al-Qaida and violent jihad.

For more than a year, LaRose had clashed online with YouTube Smackdown, a group that flagged and reported hate speech and jihadist activity. Maybe they had contacted the FBI. But so what? Her YouTube rants couldn't be considered a crime.

Then again, what if the FBI knew more? What if agents had read messages LaRose exchanged with Eagle Eye in Pakistan or his associate Black Flag in Ireland? The men were al-Qaida -- that's what they said, anyway.

What about her jihadi friends inside the United States -- the woman in Colorado and the teenager in Maryland? Did the FBI know about them? Or about her pledge to kill the Swedish artist?

Despite the concerns, LaRose plunged forward. Without disguising herself, she began contacting fellow jihadists online. She warned them of the FBI's visit and asked them to delete anything that might prove incriminating.

Then LaRose took the next step on her path to martyrdom - an act she later described as one of the proudest moments in the conspiracy to kill the artist in Europe.

She found a bargain flight to Amsterdam for $400.

"I went straight to the airline," she says today. "I didn't use no middle person. I also made it two weeks ahead of time."

The plot, loose as it was, was advancing. Jihad Jane booked the flight for Aug. 23.

The honor student
Shortly after the FBI agent left her duplex, LaRose emailed a high school student who lived near Baltimore, about 150 miles away.

Please contact jihadi forum administrators, LaRose begged the teen. "Ask him to PLEASE remove ALL my posts … because I told the FBI guy I don't know that site."

The teenager, who went by Hassan online, did as asked. "She is being threatened by the FBI," he explained in a message to the forum administrators.

Hassan wasn't a creative pseudonym like Jihad Jane. It was simply the middle name of Mohammed H. Khalid, a gangly Pakistani immigrant who lived with his parents, older brother and two younger sisters in Ellicott City, Md.

Khalid, 15, had met Jihad Jane on YouTube months earlier and their online friendship had grown quickly. By now, they were talking to some of the same people overseas: an al-Qaida operative named Eagle Eye and a Muslim man in Ireland who called himself Black Flag.

Like LaRose, Khalid had become radicalized watching videos of Muslim children maimed or killed in attacks by Israeli or American forces. Khalid was not a convert. He had been born a Muslim in Dubai and raised in Pakistan from age 11 to 14.

His family, classic American immigrants seeking a better life for their children, had arrived in Maryland in 2007. Khalid's father delivered pizzas. His mother kept the home.

The family of six squeezed into a modern-day tenement, a tiny two-bedroom apartment selected for its location inside the best school district his parents could afford. In one bedroom, Khalid and his brother shared a mattress. In the other, his sisters lived beside stacked boxes of perfume the family peddled at a weekend flea market. Their parents slept on a mattress in the dining room.

Khalid excelled during his first two years at Mt. Hebron High School. He earned A's in English, Algebra, Science and U.S. History. He joined the chess club and later became an administrator for the school website.

Although his parents were thrilled with Khalid's grades, they began to notice subtle changes. He seemed withdrawn and spent so much time alone in his bedroom on his laptop. They worried he might be downloading porn.

If only.

Eager to learn more about his Muslim heritage, the 15 year old had stumbled onto violent jihadi videos and become addicted. The anti-American rhetoric proved intoxicating to an immigrant boy struggling to find an identity in a place that embraced neither his race nor his religion.

Khalid began translating from Urdu to English sermons and violent jihadi videos -- snuff-style images of U.S. soldiers in the throes of death, and beheadings of Americans Nick Berg and Daniel Pearl. Khalid posted the videos and began to solicit money online for al-Qaida. He never aspired to kill anyone personally. He later described himself as a "keyboard warrior."

"I will be a great facilitator," he wrote to a friend.

To shield his identity, Khalid studied basic terrorist tradecraft -- how to use programs such as Pidgin to encrypt chats and Tor to cloak his location. He learned to use code words - for example, "HK" in place of "jihad." The letters were chosen because J falls between H and K on the keyboard.

Now, in mid-July 2009 -- around the time Jihad Jane warned him about the FBI -- Khalid launched a new online endeavor. It was brimming with teenage bravado. He called the blog Path to Martyrdom/Resisting the War Against al-Islaam. From the blog, Khalid linked to hundreds of videos of al-Qaida sermons and violent attacks.

He intended Path to Martyrdom to be anonymous. His keystrokes betrayed him.

Pivoting between maintaining the school's website and his new jihadist blog, he inadvertently linked the "About Me" section of Martyrdom to the wrong web page -- the page for his high school track team.

Jamie joins
On Aug. 1, 2009 -- around the time LaRose found her bargain ticket to Europe -- a 31-year-old woman sat before a laptop at her mother's kitchen table in the remote town of Leadville, Colo.

Jamie Paulin Ramirez felt stifled. Her young son, Christian, bounded past every now and then, and her nosy mother kept making excuses to stroll by.

As discreetly as she could, Ramirez tried to shield the screen. She and her mom had clashed about her conversion to Islam. It wasn't that her mother objected to the religion; she had married a Muslim herself. She just thought her daughter was overzealous.

Ramirez feared her mom would launch into a tirade if she caught her chatting with her new Muslim friends, just as her mother criticized her for wearing a head scarf, or hijab.

"When I would pray she would scream at me," Ramirez recalled in a document reviewed by Reuters. "When I would wear my hijab to work and to the store, she would say it was embarrassing."

One of Ramirez's new online friends was another recent convert to Islam, a woman from Pennsylvania who sometimes called herself Jihad Jane. They seemed a lot alike - they were both white, blonde, Americans. And each had gravitated toward Muslim men in Europe, including one man in Ireland. He had been trying to persuade Ramirez to bring her son and join him there.

On this day, Jihad Jane wrote with big news: "Soon, I will be leaving for Europe to be with other brothers & sisters. When I get to Europe, I will send for you to come be there with me. … This place will be like a training camp as well as a home."

"I would love to go over there," Ramirez replied.

Their chat turned to politics. And, years later, the brief exchange that followed would become part of the government's case against both of them.

Jihad Jane: "When our brothers defend our faith their homes, they are terrorist. Fine, then I am a terrorist and proud to be this."

Ramirez: "That's right … If that's how they call it, then so be it. I am what I am."

Ramirez was raised a Methodist, but she had become embittered toward God and abandoned religion years earlier following her sister's death from cancer.

Thrice divorced, Ramirez had moved in with her mother to save money. But they quarreled often, especially about her young son -- what he should read, how he should pray, what he should eat for dinner, whether he should wear his hair short or long.

Ramirez had been looking for a reason to leave.

Her turn toward Islam had begun the year before, while researching a paper for a college class. Intrigued by what she learned about the religion, she continued reading. After a few months, she slipped down to a Denver-area mosque and converted.

Now, her new, nonjudgmental friends on Islamic forums were enticing her to join them. The man in Ireland -- the one Jihad Jane knew as Black Flag -- pressed Ramirez hardest.

Ramirez knew the man only by his real name, Ali Damache, and in his latest message to her, he persisted: Bring your son. Marry me. I will teach you Arabic and the mystical beauty of the Quran.

Ramirez hesitated. Men had burned her so many times. She liked what she knew of Damache. He was nice - he complimented her on the color schemes of her hijabs. Even so.

Damache urged her to ask Allah for guidance. Pray for a week, each night before bedtime, he said, then consider the colors of the dreams: If the dreams come in white or green, it is a sign that she should to fly to Ireland with her son; if the dreams come in red or black, she and her son should stay in Colorado.

Ramirez struggled to recall her dreams, but it wouldn't matter. Damache told her he had prayed, too, and his dreams were glowing green -- the color of Islam, and of Ireland.

OK, Ramirez agreed, that must be a sign from Allah. She began shopping for two plane tickets to Ireland.

The passports
In the weeks leading up to her own flight to Europe, LaRose grew excited about what lay ahead.

Finally, she would meet some true Muslims -- men more righteous than she was, people wholly committed to the cause. They would teach her to pray and the ways of Allah. More important, they would accept her as one of their own.

It would be an honor to fly to Amsterdam for training, then travel on to Sweden to carry out the killing.

Her instructions: to shoot the artist Vilks six times in the chest. "That way," LaRose recalls today, "they know it was not an accident. It was intended."

A short while before her flight, LaRose stole her boyfriend's passport and birth certificate, presumably to provide false identification for the terrorists. LaRose located two of the boyfriend's passports, one current and one expired, as well as several birth certificates.

Following her handler's instructions, LaRose mailed everything to young Khalid near Baltimore.

Then, days before the flight to Amsterdam and the start of her new life, the realities of her old one intervened: Her boyfriend's father suffered a heart attack. Soon after, he died.

Read Part 1: 'Jihad Jane' begins strange journey from abuse victim to wannabe terrorist

LaRose wasn't deterred. She let her al-Qaida associates know she was still coming. "I will be away from here in a couple days," she wrote. "… Then…I will get to work on important matters." 

Within hours, LaRose heard a knock on the door of her home near Philadelphia.

The FBI had returned. This time, LaRose answered.

Read Part 3: The jihad begins

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"Kill him."

The American who called herself Jihad Jane read the words on her computer screen. Colleen LaRose was fiddling on the Internet, passing time in her duplex near Philadelphia, when the call to martyrdom arrived from halfway around the world.

The order came from an al-Qaida operative. The date: March 22, 2009.

This was it, she thought. Her chance. At 45, LaRose was ready to become somebody.

---

A compact woman with a seventh-grade education, LaRose was a recent convert to Islam. She found a place for herself quickly, raising money and awareness online for the plight of her Muslim brothers and sisters. They were underdogs, just like her.

During her darkest days, LaRose had endured incest, rape and prostitution. She surrendered her life to drinking and drugs, from crack to crystal meth. Now, if she accepted the order to kill, she would surrender her life to a higher power: Allah.

 

The man who issued the directive called himself Eagle Eye. LaRose knew him only by his online messages and his voice, and he claimed to be hiding in Pakistan. Eagle Eye wanted her to fly to Europe to train as an assassin with other al-Qaida operatives, then to Sweden to do what few other Muslim jihadists could: blend in.

The terrorists believed that her blonde hair, white skin and U.S. passport, even her Texas twang, would help her to get close enough to the target: Lars Vilks, a Swedish artist who had blasphemed the Prophet Mohammad by sketching his face on the head of a dog.

"Go to Sweden," Eagle Eye instructed LaRose. "And kill him."

A year later, when U.S. authorities revealed the plot, they repeatedly described the Jihad Jane case as one that should forever alter the public's view of terrorism. The conspiracy "underscores the evolving nature of the threat we face," one official said at the time. A second said the case "demonstrates yet another very real danger lurking on the Internet" and "shatters any lingering thought that we can spot a terrorist based on appearance."

The case was so serious, authorities said, that they charged LaRose with crimes that could keep her in prison for the rest of her life.

The court filings and press releases draw a frightening portrait of the Jihad Jane conspiracy. But an exclusive Reuters review of confidential investigative documents and interviews in Europe and the United States -- including the first interview with Jihad Jane herself -- reveals a less menacing and, in some ways, more preposterous undertaking than the U.S. government asserted.

"I got so close to being able to do this," LaRose says today of the plan to kill Vilks.

In truth, what happened proved more farcical than frightful, more absurd than ominous.

The conspiracy included a troubled trio of Americans, each a terrorist wannabe: LaRose; a Colorado woman named Jamie Paulin Ramirez; and a Maryland teenager named Mohammed Hassan Khalid. All have pleaded guilty to breaking U.S. terrorism laws, but only LaRose was charged in the plot to kill Vilks. Her sentencing was recently rescheduled to May 7 from Dec. 19.

Since the 9/11 terror attacks, the FBI has investigated hundreds of cases similar to the Jihad Jane conspiracy. With each investigation comes a challenge: how to prevent acts of terrorism without violating civil rights or overreacting to plots that are little more than bluster.

"We are going to err on the side of caution," says Richard P. Quinn, the FBI's assistant special agent in charge for counter-terrorism in Philadelphia. "We will go after operatives and operations that are more aspirational than operational because to do otherwise would almost be negligent."

At least at the outset, authorities had no way to be certain how much of a threat LaRose might pose, given her resolute conviction and her unique attributes - primarily the way she looked. No one disputes that LaRose and Khalid managed to make contact with overseas al-Qaida operatives and with a loose affiliation of young American-born male Muslim jihadists inside the United States.

Quinn says the case exemplifies al-Qaida's new approach to terrorism. He says the Jihad Jane conspiracy -- from recruiting to planning -- "represents the many new faces of the terrorist threat."

But some civil rights advocates say the U.S. government has exaggerated the danger posed by aspiring terrorists -- in this case and scores of others.

"You can't say these people are totally innocent -- they aren't, and there's something wild and scary about them -- but almost all of them seem to be incompetent and deluded in some way," said Ohio State University Professor John Mueller, who has written extensively about how the government has handled terrorism cases. "When you look closely, many of these cases become interestingly cartoonish."

Interviews and documents, many composed by those involved in the Jihad Jane case as the conspiracy unfolded, often reveal their innermost thoughts. They also show the gullibility of the main players or the ways that they botched almost every assignment along the way.

Khalid, a troubled high school honor student who lived with his parents in Maryland, inadvertently linked his secret jihadist blog to a page on his school website.

Ramirez, a lonely Colorado woman known as Jihad Jamie, headed to Europe to train for holy war. She was lured to Ireland by a Muslim man promising a pious, married life but soon came to believe that all he really sought was a cook, a maid and a sex slave.

Perhaps most intriguing is the story of LaRose, the aspiring assassin whose devotion and naiveté left her susceptible to recruitment but prone to failure.

In the only interview she has given, LaRose says she became devoted to the Muslim men she met online and blindly followed their instructions because they seemed righteous. "I just loved my brothers so much, when they would tell me stuff, I would listen to them, no matter what," she says. "And I also was ... lost."

Indeed, just weeks into her jihad, she became homesick. And days before returning from Europe to America, she emailed the FBI -- to see whether the government might spring for her airfare home.

Despite the media attention the case has received, many details haven't been previously disclosed. Among them: how LaRose, Khalid and Ramirez became radicalized; how they found one another; how they repeatedly bungled the plot that authorities say posed a "very real danger;" and how they came to sacrifice everything for a group of strangers who promised immortality but delivered ignominy.

"Jihad Jane is a perfect figure in some ways because it's like a soap opera," says her intended victim, the artist Vilks. "This is today's most interesting part of terrorism -- the amateurs."

The encounter
Colleen LaRose's path toward terrorism began with what devout Muslims would consider a sin -- a one-night stand.

Her tryst occurred in 2007, two years before LaRose agreed to kill Vilks. At the time, she was in Amsterdam on vacation with her longtime boyfriend, Kurt Gorman, and the two were arguing.

They had dated for five years and were living in suburban Pennsylvania. They had met when Gorman, a radio technician, was dispatched from Pennsburg, Pa., to repair a 307-foot radio tower that stood near cotton fields south of Dallas. LaRose was living beneath the tower in a single-wide trailer she shared with her sister, her mother, her stepfather and two ducks named Lewis and Clark.

Gorman, who declined to talk to Reuters, was a few years younger than LaRose. Colleen found him mellow, gregarious and adventuresome. He fell for her loud, infectious laugh and her penchant for practical jokes. He flattered her with attention and spoiled her with generosity. When she told him that she wished she had bigger breasts, he paid to get them enlarged. Her new size DDs came to dominate her 4-foot-11 frame.

One night during the Amsterdam vacation, the two were at a bar and LaRose got loaded. She could be a mean drunk and she lit into Gorman. He left the bar. LaRose remained.

A short time later, a man approached her. He was Middle Eastern, a Muslim -- and handsome. She went home with him, in part to spite her boyfriend, in part because she was curious.

The decision would change her life.

The conversion
The Amsterdam dalliance with the Muslim man sparked an interest in Islam, one that LaRose kept secret from her boyfriend Gorman when they returned to Pennsylvania.

To learn more about the religion, she began visiting Muslim websites. To meet Muslim men, she signed up for a popular dating site, Muslima.com.

She used Gorman's credit card to pay for access to the site. When Gorman saw the bill, LaRose laughed it off as a lark.

LaRose believed in God but she had never followed any particular religion. As she continued to explore Islam online, she met a man in Turkey who became an especially helpful mentor. He explained the Five Pillars of Islam, and LaRose learned the wudu, the Muslim washing ritual. She ordered a Quran.

After a few weeks, she discovered that converting was easy; she didn't even have to visit a mosque. All she had to do was recite the Shahada, a pledge to accept Allah as her only God and the Prophet Mohammad as his messenger. Just months after her one-night stand in Amsterdam, while chatting with a Saudi Arabian man, LaRose typed the Shahada and converted to Islam via instant messenger.

Sitting before the Dell desktop computer, an unusual feeling washed over her. Happiness.

"I was finally where I belonged," she recalls.

She took as her Muslim name Fatima, after one of the Prophet Mohammad's daughters. "That's the prophet's favorite daughter," she reasons, "and I was my dad's favorite daughter."

By "dad," LaRose meant her stepfather. Her biological father -- she dismissively calls him "nothing more than a sperm donor" -- was, by his own admission, a monster.

The clearest documentation is contained in a series of archived juvenile court records reviewed by Reuters.

On Nov. 6, 1980 -- when LaRose was 17 -- she wandered into Runaway House, a shelter for teens in Memphis, Tenn.

The girl's platinum-blonde hair desperately needed a wash. Her hollowed eyes betrayed cocaine and heroin use. She carried venereal disease.

Colleen told a counselor that she had run away from home at age 13 and lived on the streets as a prostitute. She became pregnant and suffered a miscarriage that left her unable to have children. At 16, she married a man twice her age.

Runaway House routinely saw its share of cruelty. But Colleen's story deeply shook the counselor, Ollie Avery Mannino.

Colleen's parents, heavy drinkers, divorced when she was 3. Growing up near Detroit, she struggled in school and had to repeat the first grade. Once, she came to school with mouse bites on her fingers.

There was more. When Colleen was 8 and her sister, Pam, was 11, her biological father began to rape them, Colleen told the counselor. Her father, Richard LaRose, would appear at their door at night with a bottle of lotion, a silent signal that it was time to undress. The rapes started when Colleen was in the second grade; they continued until she ran away.

Mannino promised to help but explained that the law required her to notify a minor's parent that a runaway was safe. Colleen gave Mannino her father's number. When the counselor reached Richard LaRose, she told him that his daughter was in Memphis. Then she told him what Colleen had said.

"Yeah," Richard LaRose replied without hesitation, Mannino recalls. "I raped her."

He said it sharply, without remorse, and in such a prideful, guttural tone that Mannino snapped her head, stunned. The confession -- or boast -- is memorialized in the confidential report Mannino wrote to the court shortly after the call. To this day, Mannino, who spoke to Reuters with Colleen's permission, vividly remembers what happened next.

Colleen took the phone. Angry, her face flushed and tears flowing, she screamed at her father: "Look what you've done to me! You did this to me! It's your fault! Why? Why?"

A moment later, Colleen hurled the phone at a bulletin board, scattering notes and pictures. Then she crumpled into the chair.

The counselor bundled the girl off to a hospital for psychiatric treatment.

Mannino said she reported Richard LaRose to local authorities but, inexplicably, he never was charged with raping either daughter. He died in 2010.

"He never did say he was sorry for what he did to us," says Pam LaRose, now 52, who described the rapes recently in her first media interview. "I still have a lot of anger. Colleen feels the same way. We don't talk about it a lot. Too much pain is involved."

The cause
LaRose remained infatuated with Muslim men and Islam throughout the first half of 2008. But shortly after she converted, she stopped taking her new religion seriously. Pledges to stop drinking fell away. She never visited a mosque. She never learned how to properly pray.

Her waning interest fit an often flighty personality. In Texas, she had worked in a nursing home. But living outside Philadelphia, she held no job and struggled to pass the time while Gorman traveled.

She had her cats, Klaus and Fluffy, chatted on the phone with her sister in Texas and played games on web sites like pogo.com. She also flirted with men in chat rooms and became obsessed with fantasy warrior stories -- she read Shogun and watched the movies Spartacus, Braveheart, 300 and Troy.

Not until six months after her online conversion to Islam would she re-engage. In addition to passing time watching action movies, LaRose became riveted by violent YouTube videos of Israeli attacks on Palestinians and American attacks on Iraqis.

The videos of dead and wounded children moved her most. Sometimes while she watched, she could hear the young American children in the duplex below hers, laughing and playing. The disconnect infuriated her. No one seemed to know or care about the plight of the Palestinians. It was so unfair.

By summer 2008, LaRose was posting jihadist videos on YouTube and MySpace. She used various names online, including Sister of Terror, Ms. Machiavelli and Jihad Jane. During the next year, she exchanged messages with avowed jihadists -- people with codenames such as Eagle Eye, Black Flag, Abdullah and Hassan -- as well as with a woman in Colorado who seemed a lot like her.

LaRose didn't try to hide her posts. She didn't know how. Whenever she wanted to have a private discussion with Eagle Eye, she simply let him take remote control of her computer so he could ensure the secrecy of their chat.

Eagle Eye seemed careful, brave and righteous. He claimed to be on the run from Pakistani authorities and to have participated in the 2008 Mumbai attacks in which terrorists killed 166 people. In mere months, LaRose grew to trust him implicitly. She asked what she could do to help.

His first request seemed innocent enough: Send money to your Muslim brothers and sisters, he told her. So she did, dipping into cash that her boyfriend gave her.

LaRose knew that sending money to people who might be jihadists could be illegal, but who was watching her? Among those she helped: a Cairo cab driver who wanted $450 to fix his broken taxi.

At one point, she also tried to send $440 to a Somali man who wanted to start an online forum for an al-Qaida cell. She soon discovered that Western Union didn't serve war-torn Mogadishu.

The pledge
In January 2009, al-Qaida operatives asked LaRose to do more. They wanted her to become a martyr.

She agreed, and by February sent an online message pledging to use her blonde hair, green eyes and white skin to "blend in with many people… to achieve what is in my heart."

A month later, LaRose also agreed to an overseas rendezvous with Eagle Eye, to marry him and help him get "inside Europe."

Finally, in late March, Eagle Eye asked LaRose to commit her words to deeds. Travel from Pennsylvania to Europe, he said. Find Vilks, the Swedish artist who has blasphemed the Prophet Mohammad. Then shoot him -- six times in the chest.

LaRose felt torn.

She wanted to say yes to Eagle Eye instantly. It would be an honor to become a martyr, she thought. Few sisters received such an opportunity. Plus, she wanted to make Eagle Eye proud. He was so religious, and though she had never seen his face, she had come to love him -- not in a romantic sense but more like a brother.

But there were other considerations. Her elderly mother had recently moved to Pennsylvania to live with her, and her boyfriend's ailing father also lived in the duplex. Whenever her boyfriend traveled for work -- often -- she was left to care for them.

Sitting before the keyboard, she read and reread Eagle Eye's message: "Go to Sweden…And kill him."

She would have to choose one path or the other - an exciting life as jihadist or a mundane one as caretaker.

She chose jihad.

"I will make this my goal," she promised, "'til I achieve it or die trying."

Patiently, she awaited further instructions from Eagle Eye. But she didn't keep a low profile.

Throughout the spring and into mid-summer, LaRose drew more and more attention to herself, posting jihadi videos, anti-Zionist rants and solicitations to raise money.

Then, on a humid day in mid-July, a stranger approached the duplex near Philadelphia and rapped on her door. LaRose didn't answer, and the man left his business card behind. When she picked it up, she rushed to her computer.

LaRose sent two messages -- one to a high school student 150 miles away and another to her al-Qaida handler on the other side of the world.

The messages were the same: The FBI was onto her.

Read Part 2: A vow confirmed; a terror plot grows

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