Sniper Suspect's 'Spiritual' Supporters
Sniper Suspect's 'Spiritual' Supporters
-- For weeks they've sat there -- he in plentiful locks tucked inside a black mesh Rasta hat, she in a black scarf covering her hair, ears and neck -- on the back row of the courthouse room where the D.C. sniper trial is being shown to reporters on closed-circuit television.
They watch the proceedings intently, scribbling notes and occasionally exchanging discreet whispers, but never mingling with the other journalists chronicling the fate of alleged sniper John Allen Muhammad. When asked, they curtly respond that they are from the Underground News Network, but offer little else.
There are reasons for this. The couple dozen or so journalists surrounding them each day are the very "vultures who wish to see John Allen Muhammad hang from the gallows of The Commonwealth of Virginia," as the pair wrote in last week's Internet account, and a large part of the reason they drove their white Ford pickup all the way from Florida to be here.
In monitoring "the so-called professionals that the masses depend on to deliver the daily news," the Underground News Network's editor in chief, Ital Iman I, and executive editor and Webmaster Da.Uru I hope to offer "spiritual support" to John Allen Muhammad, who they say was chosen by higher forces to deliver coded messages to the world.
With execution lust raging in this coastal town and hardly a friend, family member or supporter in sight, Muhammad sure could use the help -- that is, if he even knows the UNN is out there, waging this spiritual battle on his behalf.
The sniper shootings were "like a message from a high priest, this initiation rite to take the world, especially black people, to a higher level, to get a higher consciousness," says Iman I, who is 46. So instead of zigzagging through parking lots and ducking behind gas pumps during the terror spree that left 10 dead last October, he says, Washington area residents should have been listening to Muhammad's missives railing against racism, corporate greed and anti-Islam sentiments.
But only the seers can read through the mysticisms that accompanied Muhammad's mission: The "duck in the noose" phrase that Chief Moose recited at the snipers' request. The tarot card left at one shooting. The notes demanding that police call the snipers "God." That's where "Word is Bond: Essaic Manifesto: The document containing the Doctrine in support of John Allen Muhammad/John Lee Malvo, " a 35-page pamphlet that UNN published, comes in. So far, they say, they've sold about a hundred copies through the Internet and independent bookstores for $23 -- as in 23 days of terror.
After Monday's proceedings, they have agreed to be interviewed in a sub shop across from the Virginia Beach Municipal Center. They decline to order anything, even water, as the Rastafarian couple who also follow some of the teachings of Islam are vegetarians who don't trust food they have not prepared with their own hands. They are soft-spoken and polite as they talk about their journey here.
"The mainstream media were not telling exactly what is going on in the courtroom," says Da.Uru I, who is 30. "They are saying that they caught Muhammad, but he actually led them to him." Thus the phrase "we have caught the sniper like a duck in a noose," meaning Muhammad would be waiting when police came for him and he would not run.
It was all in the divine plan.
During the three weeks, Iman I saw other signs. The four gas stations targeted represented the four big oil companies. The tarot card left for police was the 13th card of the deck corresponding to death, and it alluded to the 13-year-old boy shot at the school as a warning to the government that schools should be places of learning. The numerical links he makes, from Muhammad's birthday, the ages of the victims, to the dates of the shootings, go on and on.
"You have two black men who have held the nation at bay for 23 days," Iman I says. "That hasn't happened since Nat Turner. Whether they killed them or not, you have to admit that he's an intelligent man. It's the trial of the century -- it's actually bigger than the O.J. trial."
At the time Iman I started putting the pieces together last October, he had already been hosting a radio talk show based in Jacksonville and publishing a newsletter covering American Beach, the historically black resort town on Amelia Island where he and Da.Uru I live in "a small commune of nine consisting of two wives, a husband and six children." So he decided to fold the radio show and newsletter and his interest in the Muhammad case into a new Web site called the Underground News Network.
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