Fla. bomb plot suspect described as loner

TAMPA, Fla. -- The Kosovo-born American citizen accused of plotting bomb attacks around Tampa was a loner who had grown increasingly radical in his Muslim faith and publicly railed against Jews and Christians in videos he posted on the Internet, according to relatives and friends.

Sami Osmakac's life in the United States began about a dozen years ago, when he was 13 and his family immigrated to the United States, according to a video he posted on YouTube. Those who know Osmakac said he mostly kept to himself as a high schooler who loved rap music -- rapping about bombs and killing in a song he made with a friend.

As he grew older, they said, he became increasingly confrontational: One Tampa-area activist said Osmakac physically threatened him, and Osmakac was jailed on charges that he head-butted a Christian preacher as the two argued over religion outside a Lady Gaga concert.

Osmakac, 25, was arrested Jan. 7. He is now jailed on a federal charge of attempting to use a weapon of mass destruction and could face life in prison if convicted. U.S. authorities say he planned to use a car bomb, assault rifle and other explosives in an Islamist-inspired attack on various locations around Tampa, including a sheriff's office.

His family in Florida has said the charges are untrue.

Family members told the AP that Osmakac was born in the village of Lubizde in Kosovo, a tiny hamlet of scattered houses near the Cursed Mountains, a row of snowcapped peaks that divide Kosovo from Albania. The area is home to many adherents to Sufism, a mystical Islamic order whose members often pray over the tombs of revered saints.

The Osmakacs are followers of a Sufi sect with its own shrine just outside the village. Kosovo's tiny Roman Catholic minority also resides in the area, as the village next to Lubizde, Dedaj, is nearly entirely Roman Catholic ethnic Albanians.

Osmakac's family, like many who fled Kosovo, brought their traditional trade of baking to what are now Croatia and Bosnia, where they have remained since Yugoslavia's breakup after a series of ethnic wars in the 1990s. Osmakac's family was in Bosnia during the bloodiest of all those wars, which left more than 100,000 dead, and eventually fled to Germany and then the United States.

As a child, Osmakac was "a quiet and fun boy," said his aunt Time Osmankaj.

Osmankaj said the family returned to Kosovo, which declared its independence from Serbia in 2008, for summer visits. But in recent years they noticed a change in Sami, who grew a beard, donned religious garments, and was frequently accompanied by two devout Muslims from Albania and two from Bosnia. He also began to shun his relatives during his trips to Kosovo.