Judge orders involuntary commitment of Cary man awaiting trial on terror-related charges
U.S. District Judge Terrence Boyle looked down from the bench several minutes into a hearing on the mental competency of a Cary man accused of providing material support to terrorists.
Basit Javed Sheikh, the 30-year-old man fighting the allegations, was at the defense table, dressed in red prison garb, ready to share his side of the story.
Almost immediately after sitting beside Joseph Gilbert, the public defender assigned to his case, Sheikh unleashed a stream of run-on sentences held together by a commonality.
His concerns, repeated many times in many different ways, were not only that he was arrested in Raleigh-Durham International Airport in late 2013 when he was attempting to leave the country. Sheikh also argued that the United States should pay reparations for war deaths in Pakistan, his native country, Afghanistan and other parts of the Middle East – “100 camels worth of monetary compensation.”
“If you’re trying to make a record that you’re not competent, you’re doing an excellent job,” said Boyle, a judge who is known to speak his mind in the courtroom.
“No, I’m competent,” Sheikh said.
Boyle ordered Sheik to be involuntarily committed in a hospital for 120 days for psychiatric treatment. The judge told Sheikh he faced the possibility of the involuntary administration of psychiatric drugs so that he might better understand the seriousness of the charges against him.
“No thanks, no thanks,” said Sheikh, a Pakistani native in this country as a legal resident. “I am perfectly all right. My belongings should be returned to me and I should be allowed to leave this country.”
The hearing on Wednesday was not the first time questions have been raised about Sheikh’s competency or the mental health of some of the U.S. residents accused of providing material support to terrorists.
Boyle had declared Sheikh fit to stand trial in June, but Gilbert, his defense attorney, said recently he did not think he could provide the best defense possible with Sheikh offering his thoughts so freely inside the courtroom.
On Wednesday, Sheikh interrupted the 15-minute hearing often, telling the judge he was ready to tell a jury his story that day and it was a story a U.S. jury should hear.
In a series of run-on sentences, he talked about cluster bombs, the pain he felt for Pakistanis killed in the conflict, President Barack Obama, the U.S. attorney general, his family, the government and his desire to be released from custody so he could go to the airport and “leave this country for good.”
“I have a right to travel the world,” Sheikh said in one of his many outbursts. “I was leaving this country. What’s your moral rationale for holding me?”
Sheikh apparently made three or more attempts to join the Syrian civil war, according to the FBI.
His second attempt was on Sept. 5, 2013, when he booked a one-way flight to Istanbul for the next day. But he abandoned his plans, according to court documents, because he couldn’t reach his contact in Turkey, and he “could not muster the strength to leave his parents.”
Sheikh’s parents were in the federal court room on Wednesday as their son spoke quickly and often.
Sheikh’s mother has said in previous hearings that her son suffers from anxiety and depression and spent most of his time before his arrest in her home in front of a computer screen.
Throughout the Wednesday hearing, Sheikh spoke of wanting to aid “his brothers” in the Middle East.
“I have a right to take my parents, myself out of this land,” he told Boyle. “If you will let me go, I will go to the airport and leave this country. That’s the last you will see of me.”
Sheikh was at Raleigh-Durham International Airport on Nov. 2, 2013, when federal agents arrested him.
The agents had first singled him out after he contacted a confidential FBI source on a Facebook page set up and monitored as part of the effort to find U.S. residents looking to fight with militant groups.
Sheikh told one of the FBI employees that he was interested in helping Jabhat al-Nusra via “logistics, media, fight too, God willing,” court documents state. Jabhat al-Nusra is an alias for the Nusra Front, which itself has been declared by the federal government an affiliate of “al-Qaida in Iraq,” putting it under the U.S. Department of State’s “terrorist group” designation.
The FBI source had put Sheikh in touch with “a trusted brother,” supposedly with the militant group Jabhat al-Nusra, who was in fact a covert FBI employee.
Boyle said on Wednesday that Sheik’s behavior in the courtroom led him to order the involuntary commitment. He asked Jason M. Kellhofer, the assistant U.S. attorney, at the prosecutor’s table if he agreed with his proposal to reassess competency again after 120 days.
“The moment speaks for itself, your honor,” the prosecutor said over Sheikh’s voice in the background.
This story was originally published January 7, 2015 at 3:31 PM with the headline "Judge orders involuntary commitment of Cary man awaiting trial on terror-related charges."