Did ISIS fervor seize N.J. brothers?

AUGUST 16, 2015, 11:04 PM    LAST UPDATED: SUNDAY, AUGUST 16, 2015, 11:11 PM
BY JOHN SEASLY AND JEFF GREEN
STAFF WRITERS |
THE RECORD

On April 21, Nader Saadeh’s distraught mother begged her 20-year-old son, who was an ocean away, not to join the militant Islamic State.

“Do not go anywhere if u love me dont kill your mom,” Nadira Saif wrote in an email in Arabic translated by the FBI. “Dont kill my smile[.] i want be happy all the time do not leave me do not go to them!”

The email is included in one of five criminal complaints that form a detailed, emotional narrative, in which federal authorities allege that the Fort Lee High School graduate, his older brother Alaa and three acquaintances slid into an obsession with the Islamic State, its theology and its violence.

Detained for months in Jordan and arraigned in federal court in Newark last Monday, Nader Saadeh is portrayed by the FBI as a key figure in a plot that allegedly involved bomb-making attempts and aspirations to join and fight with Sunni Muslim militants of the Islamic State, or ISIS.

According to the FBI and a family friend who informed on him, Nader Saadeh was making plans to join the Islamic State, looking up plane flights and viewing Islamic State propaganda online. The case against him is based on testimony of three unidentified informers as well as video, audio and digital surveillance, and statements made by his brother, Alaa.

The brothers’ father, Khaled Saadeh, denies that his sons had any involvement with ISIS. If they had, he said, he would have turned them in himself.

https://www.northjersey.com/news/did-isis-fervor-seize-n-j-brothers-1.1393463