(Al-Fuqra - "the impoverished," seeking to purify Islam through violence - is suspected of having had ties to Richard Reid, the Briton convicted of trying to blow up a Paris-to-Miami jetliner with a shoe-bomb two years ago. Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, on his way through Pakistan to meet al-Fuqra's top sheik, Mubarik Ali Shah Gilani, was kidnapped and beheaded.)

- The sniper shootings began Oct. 2, the anniversary of the 1995 conviction of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing's ringleader Sheik Omar Abdul Rahman and others, including reputed al-Fuqra members.

- Some that knew Muhammad said he embraced the anti-Americanism of Osama bin Laden. He also is said to have rejoiced in 9/11, saying the 9/11 attacks "should have happened a long time ago." In Camden, N.J., he registered the Caprice implicated in the year-later sniper shootings to his name on 9/11 - apparently with a time notation coinciding with the World Trade Center jetliner attacks.

- A Washington state acquaintance told the FBI two years ago he suspected Muhammad of being a member of a terrorist group. Another Washington acquaintance that is not a Muslim said Muhammad always greeted him with a traditional Muslim salutation in Arabic.

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John Muhammad seems clearly to be embittered and an Islamist terrorist sympathizer. As noted here previously, if he "were a Branch Davidian or a religious rightist calling himself "God," and if his declared religion had broadly known terrorist factions, everyone would be all over his religious connections and those connections to terror." His trial could prove him to be not only guilty in the sniper shootings, but the Muslims' worst nightmare.

Prior to the sniper shootings, Muhammad dwelled outside the law in an underworld of scams, guns and false documents. He was a control freak who may have manipulated the much-younger Malvo. He may have been a Hamas or Islamic Jihad come-here or even a sleeper al-Qaidist - or if not so formally, then may have viewed himself as such. We may never know. Contrarily, many of his associations and sympathies may come out at his trial.

Indeed, if guilty in the sniper shootings, his motives may have gone beyond mere money. John Muhammad may have viewed himself - may style himself even now - as a fifth-column foot soldier in the Islamist terror war against the infidel United States.