The Boy Next Door

The man in the photo gazes back through the oversized glasses of a computer geek — his wrinkled, discolored collar encircling a thin neck, and his youthful cheeks still looking vulnerable to the occasional adolescent outbreak of acne.

He has the insouciant face of a student, a first-job seeker, of a son and a boy next door. But according to French investigators, the face of Kamel Daoudi is also one of an Islamist radical, Afghan training-camp veteran and member of an al-Qaeda network accused of plotting terrorist attacks in France — including a strike against the U.S. embassy in Paris.

New information about Daoudi, obtained from French sources by TIME, demonstrates how looks, as well as trajectories, can deceive. Once the pride of his immigrant Algerian parents and an educational prodigy with a promising future, the 27-year-old and his undated identity photograph have become iconic of just how rapidly and radically bright and integrated members of French society can be seduced by Muslim extremism. After a seemingly effortless scholastic ascent — obtaining his baccalaureate in the exacting category of science a year ahead of schedule — Daoudi encountered difficulties with university-level math and computer science studies, which intimates say rocked his self-esteem.

The ensuing soul-searching and spiritual self-examination led Daoudi to Islamic extremist circles in France, to the radical mosques of Britain and, this year, to an al-Qaeda training camp. Now imprisoned in a Paris jail cell, he has taken the sharp and questioning mind that once drew him to the cold logic of science, math and computer studies and applied it to reciting prayers, reading Koranic texts, and — in the words of one justice official — “taking extreme care not to cooperate” during interrogations. “This isn’t the same, gawky-looking kid in the picture,” the official says of Daoudi. “This is a hard-core, committed extremist who isn’t giving an inch.”

French authorities suspect Daoudi of being a key member of the multicelled network of Franco-Algerian Islamist Djamel Beghal — the charismatic extremist the self-doubting Daoudi looked to as his ideological mentor and later followed to England and Afghanistan. Arrested in Dubai on July 28 with a forged French passport, Beghal quickly admitted to having constructed terror networks in Europe to strike U.S. targets on the orders of Abu Zubaydah — believed to be Osama bin Laden’s primary strategist on global terrorism. Statements Beghal made — and later partially retracted — led to arrests of 20 network operatives in Belgium, the Netherlands, Spain and France.

But French press leaks of Beghal’s detention in Dubai allowed his associates to destroy hard drives, SIM cards and other evidence in anticipation of the Sept. 21 sweep of their suburban Paris homes. The leaks also allowed Daoudi — who was living in Beghal’s Parisian apartment — to escape capture until his arrest in Britain on Sept. 25. French investigators believe Daoudi used his computer training and Internet experience to set up and maintain secure Web communication between network members and perhaps with other al-Qaeda groups.

Though he rejects any association with terrorist activities, Daoudi proudly acknowledges his close relations with Beghal. He also freely admits contacts with other suspected network members like Nizar Trabelsi — a Tunisian former pro soccer player arrested on Sept. 13 in Belgium. Trabelsi was named by Beghal at one point as the designated suicide bomber for the planned U.S. embassy attack. Daoudi also makes no apologies for his frequent visits to a radical mosque in Leicester, England, between 1999 and this year, and he describes his May-August stint at al-Qaeda’s Jalalabad training camp this year as a form of “voluntary military service.” He has also spoken of vague plans to return to Afghanistan to live and work alongside his jihad brothers.

“But he denies all accusations of involvement in plotting terrorist attacks in any manner,” says Daoudi’s lawyer, Frédéric Bellanger. “That he may hold extreme religious views on Islamic fundamentalism and the role of jihad in its defense, and his admitted association with people like Beghal, is one thing. But accusations of terrorism is another. Kamel says his engagement is spiritual, and prosecutors will have a hard time proving otherwise.”

Though significant evidence was destroyed by network members as police moved in, investigators maintain that proof of the group’s preparation of an attack — and Daoudi’s role in it — is piling up. Daoudi was arrested, they note, with an electronic notebook filled with coded Arabic text for Internet use that is being slowly cracked. During his travels in Europe and Asia, they continue, Daoudi spent up to five hours a day in Internet cafés directing message traffic for the group. He also wired and received significant sums of money. “He played an important role,” an investigator urges. “Mere henchmen don’t get wads of money and coding manuals.”

His Internet experience and savvy may have been what made Daoudi an attractive Islamist recruit in the first place. The pre-radicalized Daoudi used the Net for educational and business applications, but also for social purposes. In March 1999, Daoudi married an ethnic Hungarian woman from Romania whom he’d met and courted in a chat room. They then lived together — “back when Kamel still smoke, drank and wasn’t concerned with religion,” one intimate recalls — near the suburban Paris neighborhood of his youth. Daoudi supported the pair with an instructor’s job at an educational cybercafé for a nearby municipality. But the erratic behavior and unexplained absences from home that had earlier replaced Daoudi’s educational regime became more pronounced with his growing commitment to the Islamist cause.

Though otherwise affable and popular, his municipal employers say, Daoudi was increasingly “unstable,” and last year — after he failed to show up to work for two straight months — he was fired from his cybercafé job. Meanwhile, Daoudi — who was hanging out with fellow radicals in Leicester at that time — wrote his wife Juliana, informing her that her failure to replicate his embrace of Islam made their marriage untenable. He ordered her to live as she chose, without him.

If the derailing of the education in which Daoudi’s parents placed so much hope took only a couple of years, his evolution from confused student to militant Islamist was even faster — less than two years from his first trip to England in 1999 to his September arrest for suspected terrorist activity. In between, he realized his goal of participating in an al-Qaeda camp but was ultimately forced to return to France to renew residence documents allowing him to continue circulating legally for the jihad in Europe.

Daoudi’s movements were so frequent that he never got the notification last June from French authorities that his request for naturalization — another dream his parents had for him — had been approved.