His remains lie a few hundred yards from a bustling highway, in a section of the Burnsville cemetery reserved for Muslims called the Garden of Eden. There is no marker. Only dirt and small rocks cover the final resting place of Shirwa Ahmed, who lived most of his life almost as anonymously.

But the manner of the 26-year-old Minneapolis man’s death has put him at the center of one of the most far-reaching U.S. counterterrorism investigations since 9/11.

Nobody knows for sure why Ahmed left Minnesota in late 2007, or how he wound up obliterated in a bomb crater in Somalia a year later. Did the once passive teenager who came of age at Roosevelt High School shooting hoops, wearing hip-hop fashions and hanging out at the Mall of America volunteer for Al-Shabaab, an affiliate of Al-Qaida? Did his self-described transformation into a “God man” lead him to return to fight in his homeland’s civil war, or become a recruit for jihad? Most frightening, was he or any other Somali ever a candidate to return home and strike within the United States?

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