UPDATE: The crack criminal investigative staff over at Colorado Pols continues to press the case that the FBI doesn’t know what it is talking about in the case of the Saudi sex monster and the possibility that he might be connected to the death of Tom Clements. Check their post.
Look, we don’t know if the guy is guilty of killing the state’s corrections officer, but we know this is a monster of a human – a man who is so without moral dimension that he imprisoned a woman and made her his sex slave for years. Nobody is convicting the guy of this crime, but there are clearly strange enough ties that the FBI is taking a hard look. That isn’t racism. That is law enforcement.
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On the morning after Colorado Department of Corrections head Tom Clements was gunned down at his home, The Colorado Observer had an exclusive angle that national and local news organizations soon followed.
Noting only a week prior to Clements death, the prisons chief had denied convicted Saudi rapist Homaidan al-Turki’s request for transfer back to Saudi Arabia, The Observer raised the specter of al-Turki’s involvement in Clements killing.
Al-Turki is bad news — in addition to raping and imprisoning his Indonesian maid, he published al-Qaeda propagandist Anwar al-Awlaki’s anti-American sermons and has powerful ties among the Saudi elite. (In a strange local twist, al-Awlaki is a CSU grad.)
Law enforcement, as far up as the FBI we hear, immediately looked to an al-Turki connection, not least because, as The Observer reported exclusively, there were threats of retaliatory violence made when al-Turki was convicted in 2006. As The Observer‘s Tyler Sandberg reported at the time:
A 2006 classified State Department cable written by Deputy Chief of Mission in Saudi Arabia, Michael Gfoeller, said that “some Saudi contacts even fear that [the conviction of al-Turki] could encourage acts against Americans both inside and outside the U.S., including terrorist actions.”
This solid bit of reporting earned The Observer an outlandish attack from left-wing Colorado Pols, who deemed it “idiotic xenophobia.” Why? Because The Observer is a conservative-leaning publication, it must be racist.
We decided to let them prattle on with their progressive rant about political correctness at the time because if they wanted to defend an al Qaeda-affiliated rapist, that was on them. If they wanted to become the Al-Turki Times, well, we weren’t going to stop them from making fools of themselves.
In the weeks after Clements death, a white supremacist named Evan Ebel, who was part of the prison gang 211 Crew, was eventually tied to the killing and died in a shoot-out with Texas police while on the run.
But now comes a fresh angle in the story, with The Denver Post reporting that authorities are looking into the possibility that al-Turki paid the 211 Crew to carry out the killing of Clements:
Federal and state investigators pursuing leads in the killing of Colorado prisons chief Tom Clements are exploring possible links between a prison gang and a Saudi man whose petition to be sent back home was denied by Clements just one week before his death…
FBI agents are investigating any possible financial transactions between al-Turki and 211 Crew members to determine whether he had hired the gang for protection, among other things, sources told The Denver Post. Investigators are examining his bank records, prison financial accounts and prison commissary records. Investigators are also interviewing al-Turki associates who run errands for him outside of prison, one source said.
“The FBI is trying to trace the money,” the source said. “Al-Turki has tons of money in his bank accounts. He has operatives in the U.S. that he calls. He tells them to move money here or there. When he calls on a prison phone, it’s all recorded. We know he moves money from account to account.”
We won’t hold our breath waiting for Pols to retract their sad and pathetic slander of solid reporting from The Observer. We will, however, marvel at the pure stupidity of Pols’ rush to attack on behalf of a Saudi sex trafficker. We couldn’t think of a worse false “victim” to rally around.
Nice work Observer and Colorado Peak Politics! Very Nice Work!