Egyptian Mostafa Said Abou-Shyahin is one of five "men with Middle Eastern ties" charged in Memphis with conspiracy to sell Tennessee driver’s licenses. A sixth defendant had been Katherine Smith, a state license examiner charged with taking $1,000 apiece for each license she illegally made available.
Ms. Smith was to testify on Monday, February 11, but at about an hour past midnight on Sunday she burned to death in a blazing car crash. Her car, a 1992 champagne-colored Acura, had been acquired from co-defendant Khaled Odtllah, who came to America from Jerusalem 13 years ago and is the suspected mastermind behind the license-getting scheme.
Smith’s horrifying death is "most unusual and suspicious," said Asst. U.S. Attorney Tim Di Scenza, who told the court on February 11 that "connections" might link these co-defendants to terrorism and September 11. One of the five, Jordanian Sakhera "Rocky" Hammad who has become a U.S. citizen and New York City resident, had in his wallet not only a Tennessee driver’s license Smith helped him obtain – but also a Visitor’s Pass for the World Trade Center dated September 5, 2001, ostensibly so he could work on its fire sprinklers.
FBI agent on the case J. Suzanne Nash has acknowledged that no public evidence yet proves any of the five are terrorists, as Tom Bailey, Jr., reported in the Memphis Commercial Appeal. But while they have not been linked to terrorism or to Smith’s nightmarish death on the eve of testifying, said U.S. Magistrate Judge Diane Vescovo, "She is connected to the case against them." And Smith might also have been able to identify others disguised among us by the cloak of illegal driver’s licenses she provided.
When he left the Memphis Peabody Hotel medical banquet just before midnight on November 15, 2001, famed Harvard molecular biologist Dr. Don Wiley, 57, was reportedly happy, sober, and headed for his retired chemist father’s home 20 minutes away. His wife and 7 and 10-year-old kids planned to join him the next day. He had already purchased tickets to take his son to Elvis’ home Graceland.
Hours later Wiley’s rental car was found almost five miles away in the wrong direction, on a mile-long bridge across the Mississippi River, with its gas tank full and keys in the ignition. Slight scrapes of yellow paint reportedly were on one side of the white Mitsubishi Galant, and a wheel cover was missing. No other evidence of foul play was to be seen, but Wiley’s family was firm that the healthy and successful scientist (winner of the $1 million Albert Lasker Medical Research Award, considered by many as harbinger of a Nobel Prize) would not have committed suicide.
On December 20, Wiley’s 6’3" body was found "snagged in a tree" in the Mississippi more than 300 miles south near Vidalia, Louisiana. His exact time or date of death could not be determined. One of America’s preeminent experts on deadly infectious diseases that might be used in bioterrorism (including AIDS and Ebola virus), and a scientist who may have had tangential links to lethal disease research at New York’s Plum Island, was dead under strange circumstances.
Conspiracy buffs speculated wildly about Wiley’s disappearance and death, of course. But these same alarmist eccentrics also connect other random dots.
On November 12, e.g., just three days before Wiley disappeared, another expert on deadly infectious diseases Dr. Benito Que was found dead outside his University of Miami Medical School lab.
On November 23 the former head of the Soviet germ warfare program Dr. Vladimir Pasechnik was found dead, reportedly from a "stroke," in the United Kingdom to which he defected in 1989. He had worked for the British government, and in 1999 formed his own company, Regma Biotechnics.
On December 10 prominent DNA researcher and founder of the Virginia Biotechnology Association Dr. Robert Schwartz was found stabbed to death in his secluded farmhouse.
On December 14 veteran microbiologist Set Van Nguyen was found asphyxiated in an airlock at the same Australian Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) facility, where months earlier scientists had developed a virulent strain of mousepox. If this lethality were mimicked in its cousin smallpox, the result could be an incurable global plague that might kill billions of humans.
Are these coincidences like what followed France’s announcement decades ago that it would develop H-bombs, when within weeks thereafter14 of the top people in France’s nuclear program died in mysterious airplane crashes? Katherine Smith’s auto immolation a day prior to testifying might have been mere chance, especially now that Tennessee is rushing towards issuance of driver’s licenses to all illegal aliens anyway, while the nation moves to make state driver’s licenses our National I.D. card. Dr. Wiley, official voices surmise, probably went into rare convulsions and was blown over the bridge guardrail into the Mississippi 100 feet below by the windwave of a passing truck.
Reasonable people would say that any prudent look at such fatal coincidences should lead us to support President George W. Bush’s life-and-death, open-and-clandestine war against terrorism. Those with a more "liberal" imagination prefer to believe that Denial really is just a river flowing past Memphis, Tennessee.