New Mexico / Siraj Wahhaj
Posted: Mon Aug 06, 2018 6:06 pm
Via: https://www.npr.org/2018/08/06/63591976 ... -in-squalo
Via: http://www.foxnews.com/us/2018/08/06/mo ... ested.html
Police in rural New Mexico have rescued 11 children living in what authorities have described as a squalid compound after receiving a tip that they were "starving."
The children, ranging in age from 1 to 15, were removed from the compound in the small community of Amalia, near the New Mexico-Colorado border, about 145 miles northeast of Albuquerque.
"They were skinny, their ribs showed, they were in very poor hygiene and very scared," Taos County Sheriff Jerry Hogrefe told ABC News Radio.
"I've been a cop for 30 years. I've never seen anything like this. Unbelievable," Hogrefe said. "These children were hungry, they were thirsty, they were filthy."
Two armed men, identified as Siraj Wahhaj, 39, and Lucas Morten, 40, were arrested. Three women, believed to be mothers of the children, were also briefly detained, Hogrefe said.
...
The Taos News reports that a toddler who shares the same surname as Wahhaj, and whom authorities had been searching for, was not among those rescued in the raid. The 3-year-old had been reported missing from his mother's Georgia home in December.
The newspaper adds, "According to Clayton County police, the toddler and his father had last been seen Dec. 13 traveling with two adults and five children in Alabama when they were involved in a single-vehicle accident on Interstate 65. The Alabama officer who talked to the group after the accident said they 'indicated that they were traveling to New Mexico for a camping trip.'"
Via: http://www.foxnews.com/us/2018/08/06/mo ... ested.html
The boy's father was among five people arrested after the raid near the border with Colorado, and documents made public in a court filing Monday said the father told the boy's mother before fleeing Georgia that he wanted to perform an exorcism on the child because he believed he was possessed by the devil.
...
Wahhaj's son, Abdul-ghani, who was 3 when he disappeared last December, was not among the children found, but Hogrefe said authorities have reason to believe the boy was at the compound several weeks ago.
Hogrefe's deputies are searching for the child, along with the FBI and Georgia authorities in Clayton County, where officials say the boy was living before his father took him around Dec. 1, 2017.
...
The grandfather of the missing boy, Imam Siraj Wahhaj of Brooklyn, New York, issued a plea on Facebook for helping finding his grandson.
In a federal court filing in 2006, Siraj Ibn Wahhaj claimed he was harassed on his way to and from Morocco by customs agents at JFK Airport in New York because he is "the son of the famous Muslim Imam Siraj Wahhaj."