A controversial imam who was an “unindicted co-conspirator” in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing was among a group of Muslim leaders invited yesterday to a meeting with Mayor Bloomberg at City Hall.
Siraj Wahhaj has defended the convicted WTC bomb plotters, called the FBI and CIA the “real terrorists,” and said he hopes all Americans eventually become Muslim.
He was among religious and civic leaders who met with Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Ray Kelly to discuss the deadly Fort Hood shooting spree.
Wahhaj was one of 170 people identified in 1995 as unindicted co-conspirators in the attack two years earlier. He has denied any involvement.
Wahhaj said Bloomberg invited him to the roundtable and shook his hand when he entered the meeting room, which was closed to reporters.
“I think that if the mayor had any discomfort he would not have invited me,” said Wahhaj, an imam at Masjid Al-Taqwa in Brooklyn.
Bloomberg, however, initially claimed not to know Wahhaj was there.
As he was leaving, a Channel 2 reporter asked the mayor if he was uncomfortable about Wahhaj’s presence.
“I don’t know. He’s not here,” the mayor responded. When told that Wahhaj was in fact in the meeting, Bloomberg reversed course.
“That one. Yes. We have to talk to everybody,” he said. “That’s what dialogue is all about. That’s how you prevent tragedies.”
Bloomberg’s spokesman Stu Loeser later said it was aides, not the mayor himself, who invited Wahhaj and the others.
Wahhaj’s name was omitted from a guest list given to the press after photographers were invited in to take pictures.
Loeser said the list was intended to identify those at the meeting and Wahhaj arrived late, which is why his name was not on it.