Five men who worked, lived and socialized together in western New York were schooled in the tools of terror, including the use of suicide as a weapon, in camps run by Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda network, federal officials said.
Federal authorities who announced the arrest of the members of the alleged terror cell said Osama bin Laden himself lectured the men on his anti-American beliefs while they were in Kandahar, Afghanistan, in the months leading up to last year's Sept. 11 attacks.
The men came home to Lackawanna, 8km south of Buffalo on the shore of Lake Erie, in June of last year. Federal agents said they had no information the cell was planning an attack in the US.
"We have the key players in western New York," FBI Special Agent in Charge Peter Ahearn said Saturday. He added the investigation was continuing.
The George W. Bush administration hailed the arrests in New York and the capture in Pakistan of a suspected Sept. 11 operative as a victory in the war against terrorism.
The New York men, all in their 20s and of Yemeni descent, appeared in a Buffalo courtroom Saturday in handcuffs and shackles and were charged with unlawfully providing material support and resources to foreign terrorist organizations.
The judge entered a ``not guilty'' plea for each and ordered the men jailed until a detention hearing Wednesday.
Officials said the discovery of the terrorist cell was connected to information that also prompted the Bush administration to raise America's terror alert to ``code orange'' -- the second-highest -- on the eve of the attacks' one-year anniversary.
The investigation into the Lackawanna cell began in early summer of last year, about the time records say the men returned from Afghanistan, and the communications and other activities surrounding the cell intensified this month, said Michael Battle, US attorney for western New York.
"It seemed from all indications that the activity of these five individuals began to move in a number of different directions," Battle said yesterday on CNN. "The evidence pointed us, more importantly, to a particular time, which was this past few days, to make the arrest rather than something particular happening."
He wouldn't give specifics.
According to the criminal complaint unsealed by the judge Saturday, the five New York men -- Shafal Mosed, 24; Faysal Galab, 26; Sahim Alwan, 29; Yasein Taher, 24; and Yahya Goba, 25 -- live within a few blocks of each another in Lackawanna and trained together at a camp in Afghanistan.
FBI Special Agent Edward Needham wrote in the complaint that unindicted co-conspirators told him Goba, Alwan, Mosed and Taher attended al-Qaeda's al-Farooq terror training camp near Kandahar.
It was the same camp John Walker Lindh attended, but officials declined to say if Lindh assisted with the investigation.
Relatives of the men denied they were involved with al-Qaeda.
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