Officials say arson was cause of fire in Springfield mosque

Investigators probing a fire Wednesday night that severely damaged a Springfield mosque have concluded that it was arson, but have not yet been able to determine whether the blaze was a hate crime, a fire official said yesterday.

"They have determined that it was a deliberately set fire," Springfield Fire Department spokesman Lieutenant Neil Hawley said.

The fire, which is also being investigated by federal agents, was set on the second floor of the Al-Baqi Islamic Center about 5 p.m. Wednesday, officials said. No one was hurt, but the 121-year-old former school building suffered severe damage.

Mosque officials reacted cautiously to the report about the arson determination yesterday, saying that the arsonist or arsonists must have come from outside the neighborhood where the mosque has been a fixture for decades.

"There's been a great deal of suspicion and rumors to that effect [arson]; I was waiting for the verdict," said Mujahid Aleem, a spokesman for Al-Baqi center. "We've had such good relations [with neighbors]. It must be someone outside of the community."

Hawley said investigators are checking leads on a suspect, but declined to elaborate.

He also said that investigators believe the fire could be related to an earlier break-in at the mosque, but again declined to give further details.

While some members of the mosque said last week that they feared the fire was a product of anti-Muslim sentiment, Hawley said that officials had found no reason to believe it was an act of religious hatred.

"There's been no indication of any hate crime at this time," he said. "Sometimes people will light a fire to hide a crime."

One mosque member, Gha-Is Shakr, told the Globe last week that there was a break-in at Al-Baqi several weeks ago in which items were stolen. About a week later, someone broke a window at nearby Muhammad Mosque No. 13, Shakr said.

The arson determination took several days, officials said, in part because the slate roof on the two-story building collapsed, leaving the structure temporarily too unstable to bring in dogs trained to detect the smell of accelerants. State Police arson investigators took aerial photographs of the site as part of the investigation, and Springfield firefighters interviewed neighbors and asked a nearby community center for its security-camera video footage. Reward notices have been posted along a chain-link fence that surrounds the charred mosque, asking people to call the Springfield Arson Hotline at 800-682-9229.

Police and fire investigators will maintain control of the mosque for at least a few days, because "they still have a lot of evidence they want to go through," Hawley said.

The center was housed in one of the oldest schools in Springfield, a structure built about 1883. The building was appraised at about $250,000, and was insured, a mosque official said last week.

Dr. Saleem Bajwa, executive director of the Islamic Council of New England, an umbrella organization that coordinates activities between mosques, said the displaced Al-Baqi worshipers and other Muslims from the Boston area gathered last night at the Islamic Center of Western Massachusetts in West Springfield to exchange the latest news, plan a response, and offer support.

"These days it does really send a shock wave through the whole Muslim community," Bajwa said last night. "We were already facing some threats to Islamic centers in the Boston area. We were just dealing with that, meeting with law enforcement, and now this happened. This has raised our fears.

"It doesn't take much for a misguided person with ill intentions to do harm to any other mosque," Bajwa said. "That's what we are worried about."

Before the fire, more than 20 families attended the Al-Baqi center regularly for Friday afternoon prayer, and general education for the public took place every Sunday morning, mosque leaders said.

Springfield's Muslim community, with an estimated 500 families, was founded in the mid-1950s by Malcolm X and Elijah Muhammad. Al-Baqi was originally rooted in the Nation of Islam, but for nearly four decades its worshipers have followed the movement led by Elijah's son, Warith Deen Muhammad.

Aleem said that the fire and the arson investigation have motivated the Muslim community to conduct a broader outreach in Greater Springfield.

"It's heightened our level of awareness," Aleem said. "We're taking it as an opportunity to push harder and try to build better relations to make sure that these incidents don't happen anywhere else."

Material from the Associated Press was used in this report.