S. African Muslim Group’s Security Chief Arrested in Slaying

CAPE TOWN, South Africa — Outside in the rain, masked Muslim zealots recently prepared for their nightly raids, chanting “Fight! Fight!” and “Kill them! Kill them!” as they loaded shotguns and other weapons into their cars.

But inside the Gatesville Mosque that evening, Nadthmie Edries cautioned a reporter not to worry about a seemingly greater threat than the vigilantes’ clashes with local gangs and drug dealers.

Muhammed Ali Parker, the self-styled “chief commander” of People Against Gangsterism and Drugs, or Pagad, had earlier announced that he had received offers of help from moujahedeen fighters in Afghanistan, the Iranian-backed Hezbollah and the Palestinian radicals of Hamas.

“At the moment, we have not invited them to come to our aid. But should we, they will come by the planeload,” Parker had said.

Edries, 37, a former banker who is Pagad’s chief of security, laughed at the idea of foreign intervention.

“This is just a tease to get people to pay attention,” he said.

Police did. Early Tuesday morning, they raided Edries’ home and arrested him on charges of murder and sedition. A police spokesman said Parker and another prominent Pagad leader, Farouk Jaffer, were wanted for questioning and probably will be charged as well.

Police Superintendent John Sterrenberg said the murder charge stemmed from the shooting and torching on Aug. 4 by a mob of Pagad followers of a reputed drug lord, Rashaad Staggie. The charge is the first to follow the grisly slaying. No one apparently has been charged with sedition since white minority rule collapsed and Nelson Mandela was elected South Africa’s president in 1994.

“Sedition, in very basic terms, is attempting to overthrow the government by violent means,” Sterrenberg said. “It’s insurrection. It’s taking the law in their own hands.”

Several Muslim clerics and a local Muslim radio station quickly condemned the police crackdown. But streets in the Cape Flats, home to most of the country’s estimated half a million Muslims, appeared calm Tuesday afternoon. It wasn’t immediately clear if the arrest would defuse the growing tension here or fuel it further.

“This was a serious miscalculation that could blow up in their faces,” warned Ebrahim Moosa, director of the Center for Contemporary Islam at the University of Cape Town. “The popular perception now is the police are victimizing the people who are trying to root out gangsterism and drugs. Clearly this will create a lot of anger at police and will fulfill the objectives of the extremists in Pagad. It makes them martyrs.”

For now, police and intelligence officials are treating Parker’s warning as bluster rather than a serious threat. But there is no doubt that a strong strain of militant, fundamentalist Islam has fueled the conflict.

In the nine days since masked Muslims publicly executed Staggie, Pagad leaders have issued death threats to journalists, warned of suicide bombings, masked their faces in public and defied police by marching with weapons.

On Monday, Pagad leaders instructed followers to form “guerrilla cells” to avoid police detection. They also announced a jihad, or holy war, not only against the gangsters and drug lords but against the police who fired tear gas and rubber bullets at Pagad marchers on Sunday, wounding nine people.

“These are very powerful symbols,” said Daniel Nina, head of the Community Peace Foundation at the University of the Western Cape. “They are the symbols of terrorism” used by Muslim guerrillas in Algeria, Egypt and Lebanon.

Pagad leaders, however, say the term “jihad” can also mean a moral struggle, and they angrily deny that the group is extremist or even exclusively Muslim. But Farid Esack, a Muslim theologian and former head of Call of Islam, an activist group, said it is both.

“When [they] say that anyone who describes the group as fundamentalist, or as vigilantes, does so at the risk of death, then they are clearly extremist,” he said. “In terms of behavior, and the ideological origins of this group, they are fundamentalist.”

Most Muslims here are mixed-race citizens of Malay descent who were called “colored” under the racial stratification of apartheid. Many complain they are still stigmatized by the black-led government. A familiar refrain is that they were not white enough under apartheid and they are not black enough now.

Added to that is anger in a conservative community at the swift changes under democracy. Parliament is expected to soon approve a sweeping bill, for example, that effectively will allow abortion on demand. And the newly approved constitution is the world’s first to specifically protect gay and lesbian rights.

Moosa said Pagad began in November as a grass-roots movement, tapping into frustration and anger at rising crime and police corruption. But he said local Muslim extremists soon hijacked the group, adding fiery Pan-Islamic rhetoric and anti-government ideology.

“One is not hearing the moderate voice now,” he said. “In fact, people are scared to speak. Any voice of reason in this very emotive climate is seen that if you’re not with them, you’re against them.”

Militant Islam is not new in South Africa. In the early 1980s, a shadowy group called Qibla received funding and military training from Iran and called for creation of an Islamic state here. Early protests mirrored those in the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s Iran, with masked marchers chanting “Death to America!”

More recently, Muslims from the Gatesville Mosque, considered the country’s most conservative, have regularly protested outside the U.S. and Israeli consulates in Cape Town.

Intelligence services in Pretoria are investigating reports, originally published in the Jerusalem Post, that Middle Eastern terrorist groups have created military training camps in South Africa. The existence of the camps has not been confirmed, but officials have said that some South African Muslims received training in the past in Afghanistan, Iran and Libya.

Experts consider it unlikely that Iran or Libya would support such training, because Mandela has resolutely backed both regimes as thanks for their past support of his African National Congress and other anti-apartheid groups.