Historical Dictionary of Terrorism Third Edition

RUKN(S) OR EL RUNKN(S) • 607the APRA. During November 1988 the Command carried out bombingsand threats in Lima, including an attack on two journalists, oneof whom died. On 1 November 1988 the group bombed the home ofa French Catholic priest who had ties to the Túpac Amaru RevolutionaryMovement. On 28 July 1988 the group assassinated ManuelFebre Flores, a politician of the Red Fatherland Party, a Communistgroup. On 12 August 1988 group members assassinated Miguel PasacheVidale and Javier Ports Solano, two members of Túpac Amaru,and on 13 February 1989 they also assassinated Saúl Isaac CantoralHuamani, the secretary general of the National Federation of MineWorkers. After 1990 the activities of this group ceased.RUKN(S) OR EL RUKN(S). El Rukn (Arabic, meaning “the pillar”),also known as the Black P. Stone Nation, was a Chicago-basedcriminal gang, a strictly entrepreneurial terrorist group, foundedin 1960 by Jeff Fort and Eugene Hairston. It was originally known asthe Blackstone Rangers but merged with the rival Eastside Disciples.After Hairston was convicted on drug charges on 6 June 1966, theremaining leader, Jeff Fort, renamed the gang as El Rukn and styledhimself Caliph Abdul-Malik. The group succeeded in representingitself as a community service organization to the U.S. Office of EconomicOpportunity, which they defrauded of $972,000 in communitydevelopment grant funds. Although some gang members are convertsto Islam while others have affected Muslim names and refer to theirmeeting places as temples, there is no evidence that the group wasever a bona fide Islamic group or sect, and it is believed to have affectedthe pretense of being a religious organization only to mask itsdrug-trafficking and extortionary activities.In 1986 El Rukn contacted a Libyan representative in the UnitedStates and obtained Libyan agreement in principle to sponsor terroristactions by El Rukn in the United States in exchange for Libyan financialrewards. This plot was uncovered by U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation(FBI) agents in August 1986, when police raids of a Ruknmeeting place uncovered automatic weapons, pistols, hand grenades,and an M-72 rocket launcher. Wiretaps revealed that El Rukn membersoffered to carry out bombings of U.S. government offices and to shootdown a domestic commercial airliner near Chicago’s O’Hare Airporton behalf of Libya in exchange for $2.5 million. In November 1987five El Rukn members, including Jeff Fort, were convicted on weapons