DON'T marry a muslim...

Thursday, December 23, 2004

BY JAMES GORDON MEEK
DAILY NEWS WASHINGTON BUREAU

WASHINGTON - A California woman says she was married to Al Qaeda.

In a new television interview shedding light on how Osama Bin Laden's terror network operates in the U.S., Saraah Olson, 35, says one of Osama's men duped her into marriage - giving himself cover for terrorist plots and turning her dream life into a living hell she could not escape.

She finally figured it out after her husband, Hisham Diab, had the infamous blind Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman - now imprisoned for plots against New York - over for dinner.
After cooking for the evil cleric, she tried to get out by calling the FBI, Olson says in an interview on ABC's "PrimeTime Live" tonight. But she says the FBI wasn't interested and she gave up.

"I'm in hell," she recalled thinking. "I have entered the bowels of hell and I'm going to be here forever."

Abdel-Rahman visited her home in October 1992, just three months before the first World Trade Center attack.

After that - and suffering beatings from Diab - she was too afraid to come forward and went along with his schemes. "I'm not proud of it," she said. "I just knew that I lived in hell and I wanted out. If helping him ... meant that I wouldn't get hit, I was willing to do it.
"I was the wife. So it looked like a typical guy married to an American girl with the little blond-haired, blue-eyed boy in tow," said Olson, referring to her son from a previous marriage.
Under the cover of his American marriage, Diab ran a bogus charity that allegedly funneled cash to Al Qaeda, according to U.S. officials and terror researchers Steven Emerson and Rita Katz.

One of Diab's partners was his neighbor Khalil Deek, who was arrested by Jordan for plotting to blow up the U.S. Embassy at the turn of the millennium.

And Olson witnessed the recruiting of Adam Gadahn, who is now believed to be "Azzam the American," a fellow Californian who recently released a terrorist tape promising attacks that would make America's streets "run red with blood." The FBI now considers him one of the top threats to the country.

But when he first showed up at Olson's home in Garden Grove, Calif., he was a teenager she described as "fresh meat" for Diab and Deek.

"They totally take this really nice guy ... and they start teaching him their belief of Islam, their warped thought process," Olson recalled.

Her nightmare finally ended when Diab fled around the time of the failed millennium plot.