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Swede wanted in terror camp probe extradited to US

Federal authorities in New York announced that a Swede of Lebanese descent, wanted in connection with establishing a terrorist training camp in Bly, Oregon, in 1999, was extradited to the US on Tuesday.

Officials said the defendant, Oussama Abdullah Kassir, was taken into custody in the Czech Republic by FBI agents and returned to the US to face charges of providing material support to terrorists. He was arrested on Dec. 11, 2005, during a layover in Prague while traveling from Stockholm to Beirut, officials said.

The extradition of Kassir, 41, is another chapter in the sprawling investigations related to the camp in Bly that have touched three continents and have led to the 2003 guilty plea of James Ujaama, a convert to Islam who owned a computer business in Seattle, where he also worked as a motivational speaker. Two other suspects, Abu Hamza al-Masri, a blind, one-armed Islamic cleric, and Haroon Rashid Aswat, one of Masri's chief aides, are in custody in Britain awaiting extradition.

Federal officials said the nearly two years it took for the extradition of Kassir was part of the normal process and was not a result of undue delay.

In November 1999, the authorities said, Kassir and Aswat traveled on an Air India flight from London to Kennedy Airport in New York and embarked on a bus trip to Seattle. Working on behalf of Masri, they then went on to Bly, officials said, to establish a "jihadi" training camp.

In the two months before they left Bly, the two men produced a series of CDs that were to be used to teach recruits how to make poisons and construct bombs, said Michael Garcia, the US attorney in Manhattan. In a fax sent between Kassir and Aswat, the property was described as being in "a pro-militia and firearms state" that "looks just like Afghanistan," officials said.
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