On the leafy Midwood campus of Brooklyn College, a
lecture at the school’s Islamic Society had just ended
when a woman stood up and asked to take the Shahada, the
Muslim testimony of faith.
Nobody knew the woman with light skin and dark hair,
who appeared to be in her twenties. In a voice that
lilted up at the end of each sentence, she began
professing her new beliefs. “Melike Ser” or “Mel,” was
not a student and had no apparent connections to the
school, but the students embraced her anyway, excited
about her conversion.
This past April, four years after Mel’s public act of
faith, two Queens residents, Noelle Velentzas and Asia
Siddiqui,
were
arrested and charged with allegedly planning to
build a bomb. The US Justice Department
issued a
release stating that the women were linked to
members of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and the
Islamic State, and revealed that a Detective from the
NYPD’s Intelligence Bureau was heavily involved in
bringing the women to justice.
Among the ISO members, some of whom ran in the same
social circles as Velentzas and Siddiqui, the arrests
set off a chain of frantic text messages, phone calls,
and Facebook posts: “Mel” wasn’t “Mel.” She was an
undercover cop.
Three Brooklyn College graduates who had been close to
the undercover officer told Gothamist of the intimate
ties she developed with Muslim students, her presence
during some of the most private moments of their lives,
and the fear they endured when they learned her true
identity.
“I felt violated,” said Jehan, 30, who met Mel years
ago in the Brooklyn College ISO prayer room. (At their
request, Gothamist has used pseudonyms for all the women
interviewed.)
“You trust someone, you talk to them. And they were
just gathering information about your community.”
While little is known about the case against Velentzas
and Siddiqui, including how and why the NYPD came to
involve an undercover officer in the alleged plot, it
appears that Mel made an aggressive effort to befriend
and surveil law-abiding Muslims years before she ever
met her alleged targets, and did so at least up until
December of 2014, eight months after the de Blasio
administration
pledged
to stop the NYPD’s blanket surveillance of innocent
Muslims.
“Muslim New Yorkers are still fighting for basic human
rights,” the Mayor
said at
a Ramadan dinner at Gracie Mansion in July of last
year. “We recently shut down the Demographics Unit at
NYPD, which conducted surveillance on Muslim New
Yorkers. Because it’s unfair to single out people on the
sole basis of their religion.”
Two individuals with close knowledge of Velentzas and
Siddiqui’s case confirmed that Mel is the undercover
officer identified in the criminal complaint.
Ramzi Kassem is a professor at CUNY School of Law and
also directs the school’s Creating Law Enforcement
Accountability & Responsibility (
CLEAR)
project, which provides legal advice to New Yorkers
affected by counterterrorism practices.
“For an undercover to be seeded in a community for that
long without a specific target raises some deeply
troubling questions about the direction of policing in
our city,” he said. “Casting blanket suspicion on entire
communities does not square with most New Yorkers’
understanding of the police’s role in our democratic and
open society.”
Jehan has lived in New York City for 25 years. “I grew
up here. To have this happen because of your religion,
or your political views, it's scary. You feel alienated.
And you don’t feel like this is your home.”
At first, Mel seemed warm and friendly, if a bit eager.
“She was very nice, very charming,” said Shereen, who
studied psychology at Brooklyn College and now works as
a psychotherapist. “She wanted to do everything with
us.”
Mel told the ISO women that she was a recent Rutgers
College graduate who had grown up in Queens. She said
that she was of Turkish descent and had been born into a
Muslim but non-practicing family.
The women active in Brooklyn College’s Islamic Society
were diverse. They majored in women’s studies,
psychology, pre-med and political science, hung out with
friends, crushed on boys, and nurtured their newfound
political consciousness. They were coming of age in a
city scarred by 9/11, and although their Muslim identity
did not define them, it shaped their everyday lives.
But they knew their behavior was being scrutinized by
the authorities. After 9/11, both the NYPD and the FBI
revamped their approach to terrorism investigations and
began operating under a policy of preventive prosecution
[
PDF].
In an internal document from 2007 [
PDF],
the NYPD identified particular indicators of
radicalization—“wearing traditional Islamic clothing,”
giving up drinking or smoking, and “becoming involved in
social activism.” In the NYPD’s model of measuring
threats, which have since been
broadly
criticized, young people were a key target.
Shereen, then 25, and a close friend, Faizah, were
responsible for introducing new converts like Mel to the
basic tenets of Islam. One day in early April 2011, Mel
asked Faizah to meet her on campus. “Faizah told me
afterward that Mel asked her some strange questions,
like, ‘What is all this about jihad?’” Shereen recalled.
“And asking about people who do suicide bombing.”
For Shereen and Faizah, Mel’s questions were a red
flag. They suspected she was digging for information on
the political beliefs of ISO members, possibly even
pressing them to make incriminating statements.
At the time, Brooklyn College’s ISO was known for
adhering to a particularly conservative interpretation
of Islam. The group was segregated on the basis of
gender, and the men and women did not spend time
together socially. Mel was surrounding herself with
women who covered their faces and wore long robes, but
she did not even wear a hijab. Her religious practices
did not seem to change, at least in the initial years
the women knew her, and Mel never mentioned struggling
with her new dual identity, a common experience for
converts of any faith.
It was as though Mel’s decision to take the shahada,
and the time she spent amongst much more observant
Muslim women, had no affect on her or her religious
practice. Soon some ISO members began to doubt that her
conversion was genuine.
Mel was also always available to attend events and
social gatherings, regardless of the time of day or the
day of the week. “She would mention how she works full
time,” said Rumaysa, 24, “and so then it got me
thinking, is she working at these events?”
In August 2011, about half a year after Mel appeared at
Brooklyn College, the AP began publishing a series of
Pulitzer
Prize-winning articles documenting the NYPD’s
spying in Muslim communities.
One month later,
NYPD
Confidential reported that an undercover cop had
been sent to spy on Muslim students at Brooklyn College,
despite a 1992 memorandum of understanding [
PDF]
that barred New York City police from entering CUNY
campuses without permission.
After the NYPD Confidential story broke, Brooklyn
College President Karen Gould denied that the
administration had known about the undercover officer [
PDF],
and condemned “the alleged intrusion of the NYPD into
campus life.”
Muslim students continued to believe they were being
watched. They decided to seek legal advice to discuss
their concerns about Mel. In October, Shereen and
another student approached Diala Shamas, who at the time
was a lawyer at the CLEAR project at CUNY Law. The
organization had recently facilitated a workshop for the
Brooklyn College Muslim group about informants.
"Women at Brooklyn College shared their suspicions with
us," Shamas recalled. "Unfortunately, this happens a
lot. CLEAR receives concerns about potential informants
or undercovers, and we can rarely help definitively
confirm their suspicions. We do advise people to stay
away from someone who makes them feel uncomfortable."
The students also tried to do their own digging. In
February 2012, Rumaysa searched online to try to find
out if Melike Ser was who she said she was.
“I tried Googling any combination [of her name] that
could possibly bring up even a picture of her,” she
said. “But nothing showed up, absolutely nothing.”
Without a way to corroborate their suspicions, the
women decided to stay silent. “We just said, no, maybe
that’s just how [Mel] is,” recalled Shereen. “Maybe
we’re just too paranoid.”
It was also a question of faith. Backbiting without
proof is strongly frowned upon in Islam, as is shunning
a convert.
Mel continued to immerse herself in the student
community, attending Islamic education classes, social
gatherings, and trips to museums and the aquarium.
Shereen says Mel attending at least two bridal showers
for ISO women, one of which was held in a Brooklyn
College event space: "Mel shows up with this huge cake
that she carried on the train."
In time, she was privy to some of the most intimate
moments of the women’s lives, once even attending a
wedding as a bridesmaid of a fellow ISO member.
By 2014, the Brooklyn College women had graduated, but
the former students still encountered Mel around the
city— at NYU, John Jay College, the
MAS Youth Center,
the Muslim Community Center in Sunset Park, Masjid
Al-Farooq on Atlantic Avenue, and the
Brooklyn
Islamic Center in Mapleton, where Mel was last
seen on December 30 of last year. When the women saw
Mel, they generally tried to avoid her.
Just a few months later, Velentzas and Siddiqui were
arrested. The NYPD and FBI were broadly praised for
their apparent success in foiling a homegrown terrorist
plot. In an interview on
FOX's
“The Kelly File,” New York Congressman Peter King
called on Americans to “wake up and realize that we have
to put political correctness aside … there are … too
many people like this across the country.”
“These were two very, very dangerous individuals, these
two women,” King said.
Four propane gas tanks, as well as instructions for how
to turn them into explosive devices, are said to have
been found in Siddiqui’s home, and according to the
criminal
complaint, the two women had in-depth
conversations with the undercover officer about their
violent aspirations.
The complaint details how the women read up on and took
notes on various different ways to build bombs, and
browsed Home Depot for potential ingredients. Velentzas
allegedly openly praised the 9/11 attacks and had a
photograph of Bin Laden as the background on her phone;
Asia Siddiqui, meanwhile, was supposedly “close” with
Samir Khan, the Pakistani-American editor of al-Qaeda's
English-language
Inspire magazine.
“The way to read an indictment like the one in this
case, is with a great deal of skepticism,” says attorney
Gideon Orion Oliver.
Oliver was co-counsel for
Ahmed
Ferhani, who was also prosecuted for terrorism
after an NYPD undercover sting. In December 2012,
Ferhani pled guilty to five-terrorism related offenses
and one hate crime charge, and is currently serving ten
years in prison.
According to Oliver, in the Ferhani case and many
others, the undercover officers develop “really profound
and predatory” relationships with their targets,
building emotionally intimate and even familial ties
over the course of many months or years.
“The government and the undercover officers have
significant roles in manufacturing what they then
characterize as the defendants’ plots,” he said.
The case of the Newburgh Four—one of the most commonly
cited examples of "entrapment" in the War on
Terror—underscores the manipulative tactics sometimes
used by informants and undercover cops to secure
arrests. David Williams, one of the Newburgh Four
co-defendants, said the FBI informant
promised
him the money he needed to pay for his younger
brother’s liver transplant if Williams
participated in the plot.
Jose Pimentel was accused to trying to build a pipe
bomb in 2011, and
repeatedly
smoked marijuana with his government informant,
who was with him
“virtually
every step of the plot.” The federal government,
citing
Pimentel's mental state (he had allegedly tried to
circumcise himself) and the NYPD undercover's
involvement
declined
to pursue charges against Pimentel.
According to
a 2014
Human Rights Watch report that documented patterns
of rights violations in terrorism prosecutions, “the
government—often acting through informants—is actively
involved in developing [terrorism plots], persuading and
sometimes pressuring the target to participate, and
providing the resources to carry it out.”
In Velentzas and Siddiqui’s case, the undercover
officer established a friendship with at least one of
the women as early as 2013, according to the criminal
complaint.
The two women are not alleged to have been in the
process of planning a specific attack, and according to
the criminal complaint, Velentzas repeatedly stated she
would not want to harm any “regular” people, instead
targeting police or military personnel.
The NYPD undercover allegedly observed Velentzas pull a
knife from her bra to demonstrate to Siddiqui how to
stab people, then remarked, “Why can’t be [sic] some
real bad bitches?”
Velentzas later said, according to the complaint, “if
[the government] was to put all the information about
the three of us together, we legitimately, to these
people, look like a cell.”
At one point, the complaint states that the undercover
officer downloaded and printed out The Anarchist
Cookbook for the two women, even bookmarking the section
that outlined how to build fertilizer bombs.
Within a few days of the arrests, Shereen and other
Brooklyn College graduates—who said they ran the same
social circles as Velentzas and Siddiqui but did not
know them personally—learned the name of the officer in
the case and realized their longstanding suspicions
about Mel were correct.
Neither Velentzas nor Siddiqui attended Brooklyn
College. None of the women interviewed knew how or when
the pair had met Mel.
A protective order in place since July prohibits the
defendants’ legal team from releasing the officer's
assumed name. The protective order also covers any
discovery in the case, which may leave the public in the
dark about the undercover’s role in the alleged offenses
and her apparent infiltration of Muslim communities.
Lawyers for Velentzas and Siddiqui declined to comment
for this story, citing "the existing protective order
and other constraints."
For Shereen, finding out induced a kind of trauma, and
it changed her. “For three days I couldn’t eat, sleep,”
Shereen told Gothamist. “I covered all the cameras on my
phone.”
Assistant Vice President Jason Carey said that Brooklyn
College had not been notified of any undercover activity
on campus.
“Our number one priority is the security of our campus
and we do not condone any activity that could harm our
students and faculty,” he said in an email. According to
the communications office, however, Brooklyn College has
never asked the NYPD for more details on the alleged
placement of cops on campus or demanded an end to the
practice.
A set of rules called the Handschu Guidelines prohibit
the NYPD from spying on political or religious
organizations without specific information linking the
group to a crime.
“There is no doubt that the NYPD’s Intelligence
Division, Counterterrorism Bureau, and other aspects are
engaging in sweeping investigations at unprecedented
levels of communities ‘demographically’ targeted by the
NYPD through its ‘Muslim Surveillance’ and other similar
programs,” Oliver said.
He added, “What practical constraints Handschu imposes
on the NYPD in any of those investigations is a very big
open question given the NYPD’s total lack of
transparency about the lengths its agents go to in these
cases.”
Martin Stolar is one of the original plaintiffs’
attorneys in the ongoing
Handschu
v. Special Services Division lawsuit, which
challenges the city’s surveillance of and investigations
into political and religious groups.
Stolar says that the NYPD’s spying on Brooklyn College
students was only legal under Handschu if there was
reasonable suspicion that a member had intent to commit
a crime. If a participant in the ISO had sent an email
expressing their desires to plan an attack, for example,
and infiltrating the ISO was the best way to investigate
the individual’s potential criminal behavior, Handschu
would permit the placement of an undercover inside the
group.
“If there was no criminal predicate but just curiosity
or a desire to scout out Muslim students, there is a
violation,” he said.
In addition to facing ongoing lawsuits for violating
Handschu during counter-terrorism investigations, the
NYPD was also questioned for its
potentially
illegal surveillance of Black Lives Matters protesters.
The NYPD’s press office did not respond to repeated
requests for comment.
Mel appeared at Brooklyn College before the extent of
the NYPD’s surveillance of Muslims was revealed, and
remained a constant presence at least until the
beginning of this year—so the revelations about her
identity also suggest that little has changed on the
ground when it comes to the policing of Muslim
communities, despite promises by the new administration
to the contrary.
Karen Hinton, a spokesperson for the Mayor's Office,
wrote in an email that "The NYPD only carries out
terrorism investigations into specific individuals or
suspected terrorist organization—not communities, not
religions.
"These investigations into specific individuals are
carried out under a layered oversight regimen.
Investigations by the NYPD Intelligence Bureau follow
the Handschu guidelines in accordance with a federal
court ruling. Both the Mayor and Commissioner Bratton
are committed to keeping crime low, preventing terrorism
and hate crimes. With that comes the obligation to
police fairly and constitutionally. We will never waiver
from that commitment."
A
2011
Mother Jones investigation established that in
addition to the undercover police or FBI officers
assigned to infiltrate Muslim communities, there are
about 15,000 FBI informants planted around the US, many
of whom have the same task. In some sense, what makes
the experiences of the Brooklyn College students most
unusual is not that they were spied on, but that they
found out about it—that their paranoia was warranted.
“There are a few of us who trust each other, and that’s
good that we have each other—some don’t even have that,”
said Shereen. “But in the back of all our minds, there’s
always that suspicion, that either, you are [a spy], or
you think I’m one.
“We’re acting like criminals, even though we haven’t
done anything.”
Aviva Stahl is a Brooklyn-based journalist who
primarily writes about prisons, especially the
experiences of terrorism suspects and LGBTQ people
behind bars. Follow her @stahlidarity.
