TEACHING DAILY KIDS TO BE KILLERS
Tale of love, a dead baby & the doomsday cult tied to Brooklyn
The tale of a New Mexico doomsday cult whose founders were charged with running a terrorist training camp for children started as a Brooklyn love story.
Jany Leveille, 35, an undocumented Haitian woman accused by the FBI of leading the group, was once a devout Muslim woman aching to start a family.
Siraj Ibn Wahhaj, 40, the son of a prominent imam at Masjid-at-Taqwa in BedfordStuyvesant, appeared to be the answer to her prayers.
But what began full of promise evolved. They went from a loving couple with children to a polygamist relationship filled with what relatives say was jealousy, mental illness and child neglect and ended in an armed raid by state and federal authorities.
Wahhaj and Leveille met in the early 2000s, when she was a secretary at the Atlantic Ave. mosque.
Leveille immigrated to Brooklyn in 1998 with her older brother, Von-Chelet Leveille, a year after the siblings’ father passed away.
“Life was perfect until our father returned to Allah,” her brother, 37, told the Daily News from his home in Port-auPrince. “But it was difficult, nearly impossible to live there (in the United States) with no green card or citizenship.”
Leveille — “a walking Koran” according to her brother — fit seamlessly into the Brooklyn mosque, and Wahhaj became her close confidant.
“He (Wahhaj) and Jany would go out and feed the whole community,” Tariq Abdur-Rashid, 51, father to Wahhaj’s sister-in-law said. “She was doing very well, very kind.”
Her romance with the son of the imam also offered her something else she craved, status in the community.
But soon, Wahhaj had set his sights on a second woman. In 2004, he wed Hakima Ramzi, a woman he met in Morocco during a friend’s wedding. Wahhaj traveled back and forth from the United States to the North African country for years after their marriage.
“He would stay for three months in Morocco, then go back to America for six months, like that. We did that for around 10 years,” Ramzi said.
Back in Brooklyn, Wahhaj was having children with Leveille, and life was getting expensive, so the family moved to Atlanta. Eight years later, Ramzi joined them in the Peach State.
The polygamous relationship seemed fine at first, and the two women got along, relatives say.
“Jany was Hakima’s personal driver and maybe her only friend for a long time,” Leveille’s brother said. “Jany took Hakima to all her doctor appointments before birth and after she gave birth.”
But time slowly chipped away at Wahhaj’s and Leveille’s relationship. His family speculates she was suffering from schizophrenia and jealousy — a theory her brother rejects.
“Tariq (Abdur-Rashid) came up with that. Maybe he is a specialist,” Von-Chelet Leveille said dryly. “Jany has four kids by him (Wahhaj); a car, a house, more money. I don’t see why she would be jealous.”
Wahhaj confided in his brother’s father-in-law that he wanted to get out of the relationship.
“One time he told me he was feeling so exhausted from her and he thought that something was happening to him,” AbdurRashid said. “He would get fevers and wake up in the middle of the night. He expressed that to me a lot.”
“He was like, ‘Listen to me, I’m telling you, I’m telling you. She’s wicked.’”
Rumors of black magic clouded the couple. At various times, Leveille accused Wahhaj’s family of cursing her; his family accused her of putting Wahhaj under a spell.
“He said he was waking up feeling like a force was pushing him down,” Abdur-Rashid said.
“Every Muslim believes in black magic,” Von-Chelet Leveille countered. “But none of us practiced black magic. Never did and never will. I hate black magic with a passion. So does my sister.”
Leveille did practice ruqya — Islamic rituals meant to ward off evil spirits — but that was different from black magic, her brother said.
By 2014, Abdur-Rashid says that Wahhaj seemed to have completely fallen under her spell.
“He started acting very strange,” Abdur-Rashid said. “He believed she was something that he never used to believe, that she was receiving revelations from God.”
In August of that year, Ramzi gave birth to her only child, Abdul-Ghani. The boy was born with a disease called hypoxic-ischemic encephalopathy, or HIE, due to lack of oxygen during labor.
“At the beginning he had difficulty breathing. He couldn’t walk, he couldn’t talk,” Ramzi said. “He would have seizures once a month, twice a month when he was a baby.”
Doctors prescribed Keppra, an anticonvulsant, and Diazepam, a sedative, to treat the boy’s seizures. Wahhaj and Leveille had grown wary of
Western medicine, relatives say, and began thinking up alternatives — perhaps a move west would do the family good.
“Ibn was always talking about living off the land, natural herbs and all that stuff, him and Lucas (Morton),” Abdur-Rashid said.
On Nov. 30, 2017, Wahhaj allegedly told Ramzi he was taking Abdul-Ghani to a park near their Jonesboro, Ga., home. That was the last time she saw her son.
Federal prosecutors claim Wahhaj and Leveille abducted the boy because Leveille had suffered a miscarriage and believed Ramzi used “black magic” that resulted in Jany’s baby being transferred from Jany into (Ramzi’s) womb,” according to court papers.
Leveille’s brother scoffed at that allegation.
“In Islam, having seizures can also be viewed as being possessed by spirits,” he said. “We stayed in contact for the entire nine months. I am one hundred percent sure they tried to heal him (AbdulGhani).”
Investigators found Leveille’s digital journal in the New Mexico raid that revealed that the boy died without his medication on Dec. 24 — less than a month after the family left Georgia.
“On December 24th, 2017, the most horrendous event occurred,” she began, according to state court documents. “How could Quranic recitation execute a child? This only happens to shayateens (demons). Ibn Siraj recited over the other children, the children remained healthy.”
“At last, Allah confirmed that indeed, H.I.E. and diseases of the sort are not real. Isa Ibn Maryam (Abdul-Ghani) was lifeless since birth.”
For the next eight months, federal prosecutors say the family waited for Abdul-Ghani to resurrect as “Isa,” an Islamic term for Jesus Christ.
Wahhaj — who relatives say was a licensed gun owner — trained the other children living in the compound in “firearms and military tactics, including tactical reloads, disarmament techniques, clearing buildings, rapid reloads, and hand-to-hand combat,” federal court papers claim. Once “Isa” resurrected, the militia would attack “teachers, military, law enforcement, and financial institutions,” court papers say.
Leveille’s brother, who kept in touch with her through it all, refuted the charge that the kids were being mistreated. “At the end of July they spoke about the food supply getting low. But they (the children) never starved. They never ran out of food,” VonChelet Leveille said, adding that a nearby farmer often helped the family out.
Wahhaj’s sister Subhanah, a college-educated English teacher, also reached out to her father for aid. He immediately told the police, which led to the Aug. 3 raid.
“To me, there’s obviously something happening, some mental disorder, something — I don’t know what it is,” Imam Siraj Wahhaj, Ibn’s father, said outside his mosque six days after the arrests. “This doesn’t seem like them.”
State prosecutors recently decided to pause their child abuse case against Wahhaj and Leveille until the federal case could go through.
A trial date has not been set, a spokeswoman for the U.S. District Attorney’s office told the Daily News.
On Aug. 23, Hakima Ramzi buried her only child in Georgia. Now she is desperate for justice. “I want them to get life in prison. But even that is not enough for me. Life in prison is not enough for me,” she cried.
The group remains in custody until further notice — leaving the rest of their family hanging in the balance.
“This person — right now, I don’t know him,” Wahhaj’s stepmother, Jamella Jihad, said about her stepson. “People can go to sleep as believers and wake up as disbelievers. Until I talk to them myself, I’m not going to know.”