Following news that a Middle Eastern man was shot dead Tuesday morning after threatening law enforcement, the suspected terrorist’s brother has come forward to claim that his sibling is innocent of any wrongdoing.
Usaama Rahim, who had been under surveillance by the Boston Joint Terrorism Task Force, was shot dead by a police officer and an FBI agent after Rahim refused to put down a “large knife and ignored repeated commands to drop the weapon,” officials said.
The officials initially confronted Rahim, law enforcement told local media, after having received “terrorist-related information” on him. Approaching Rahim to ask questions, they were confronted with a “military-style knife.” Authorities say both the police officer and FBI agent retreated to give him a chance to lay down the knife, but Rahim instead lunged at them. This is when he was shot; both officers discharged their weapons.
In a statement posted on social media Tuesday, Imam Ibrahim Rahim, the brother of Usaama Rahim, alleged his younger brother was “shot 3 X in his back by Boston Police then dying His last words I can’t breathe [sic].”
After hearing Rahim’s account of what happened, The Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), an Islamic group with ties to Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood, has described the incident as a “police killing.” CAIR has taken to social media to promote the hashtag, #Justice4Usaama.
Also relying on the suspected terrorist’s brother, Anti-Israel Islamist activist Linda Sarsour has taken to Facebook to “demand justice” for Usaama.
While the younger Rahim’s ties to potential terrorist activity has not yet been revealed by investigators, the elder Rahim’s assertions may be called into question due to his own ties to a radical mosque and militant Imams. Imam Rahim is listed as a teacher at the Islamic Society of Boston Cultural Center, a known hotbed for aspiring jihadists. The ISB, which made headlines as the religious home of the 2013 Boston Marathon bombers, was later revealed to offer attendees a young Muslim education program with a curriculum replete with extremist texts.
Following the Boston Marathon bombing, Imam Rahim linked up with terror-connected Imam Suhaib Webb to organize the Muslim community. The Boston Globe reported at the time that Ibrahim Rahim had been “strategizing for days” to provide a coordinated response from the Muslim community of Boston in order to ensure that the bombers’s acts were distanced from Islam.
“As you process [the bombing], you think, ‘Oh boy, this looks like something from overseas, that might be affiliated to Islam, and here we go with that again,’” Rahim said in dreading how the Muslim community had to “figure out a narrative” to “make it clear” that the Tsarnaev bombers’s act “has nothing to do with the faith lived out by their congregations.”
Imam Webb has endorsed the elder Rahim as a “gem in our community.”
Suhaib Webb serves as the Imam of the Islamic Society of Boston, which falls under the same organization as the mosque attended by Boston Marathon bombers Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev. Outside of the Boston Marathon bombers, members of Webb’s congregation have included a plethora of convicted terrorists during his tenure. Additionally, Webb was once a close friend of deceased al-Qaeda mastermind Anwar al-Awlaki.
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