Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab – forever to be known as the 'Christmas Day bomber' who failed to take down Northwest Airlines flight #253 – left a series of genuinely chilling messages on online social networks, revealing a desperately lonely, deeply conflicted and frighteningly confused man.
Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab posted 310 times to the Islamic Forum on Gawaher.com, under the handle "Farouk1986."
All Farouk1986's posts have been compiled into a single file by the NEFA Foundation's jihadism researcher, Evan Kohlmann, which reveals that the terrorist wanted to know if Muhammad were alive today, "would he watch [soccer], play it, encourage it or what?"
He also asked "when is lying allowed to deceive the enemy?" And he expressed anger over the "global War On Terror [which resulted] in the death of thousands of innocent lives and thousands more detained illegally without trial or judgement."
Chilling emoticon
Perhaps most chilling of all is the young man's use of a sad-faced emoticon in the following message – found by the US counter-terrorist researcher in the archive:
"Basically, the problem I'm having is that I've been having extreme loneliness...for many years. I don't really know what to do because I'm not the type who likes to go out much, and I'm just shy and quiet. Even on the internet, I don't feel comfortable posting much because it exposes myself. Sometimes people are so mean.
So I'm trying to figure out what to do. I just wish I had someone to give me attention and stuff. I wish I had someone who would be there to listen to me, and always be nice to me. It really hurts to have someone neglect me or be mean. Unfortunately, a weakness of mine is that I'm sensitive, but I think I became more sensitive after something bad happened some years ago.
I wish I had at least one nice person to talk to, maybe over e-mail or Messenger. Of course, if I could find someone to marry, then Insha'Allah I would have someone in real life to give me all the attention and affection I wanted. So far, the families we've met aren't interested in me, though.
:("
