JOHN MUHAMMAD: NUT OR TERRORIST?

Or both?

October 28, 2003 -- VIRGINIA BEACH, Va. - Sniper slaying suspect John Allen Muhammad showed a cousin in Louisiana a rifle and claimed he was on a covert military operation weeks before the attacks that terrorized the D.C. area, the cousin testified yesterday.

Charlene Anderson told Muhammad's murder trial that she let him and fellow sniper suspect Lee Boyd Malvo stay in her Baton Rouge home for a few days in late summer 2002.

The cousins had grown up together in Louisiana, but she said Muhammad, a normally well-dressed Army veteran, looked disheveled.

Anderson said he asked where he could buy bullets for the rifle, which he carried in a duffel bag, and told her he was on an undercover mission to recover plastic explosives that had disappeared from the military.

Maybe a freelance terrorist with a touch of Walter Mitty?