By ADAM NOSSITER
c.2010 New York Times News Service
KADUNA, Nigeria – Well before Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab disappeared into the rugged mountains of Yemen with an ominous goodbye to his father – warning him that “‘this is the last time you are going to hear from me,”‘ according to top Nigerian officials – the tensions between the two pious men had already begun to show.
Though his father’s career in banking had brought great wealth, enough to finance a neighborhood mosque in the family name and hire a private imam at home, his cousins said the young Abdulmutallab openly condemned the profession as immoral for charging interest and lectured his father to quit.
“Anytime he came back on vacation” from studying abroad, said a cousin on the condition of anonymity because the family has forbidden contact with the news media, “he would tell his father he needed to quit banking because it was un-Islamic.”