ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Police on Wednesday arrested five
young American men from the Washington, D.C., area who flew to Pakistan last
month with the alleged intent of enlisting with an Islamic militant group,
Pakistani and U.S. officials said.
The five Americans were arrested in Sargodha, a dusty city
in southern Punjab Province where several Islamic militant organizations with
links to al-Qaida and the Pakistani Taliban operate, according to a senior
Pakistani official and a U.S. official in Washington.
Both requested anonymity because they weren’t authorized to
discuss the matter publicly.
It was the third known case since September in which
Americans with ties to the Pakistan-Afghanistan region have been detained over
alleged terror connections.
The group included three Pakistani-Americans, a
Yemeni-American and an Egyptian-American, the Pakistani official said. Pakistani
law enforcement officers had “continuously tracked” the men from the
moment they arrived last month at Karachi international airport. All carried
U.S. passports, he said.
They traveled to the city of Hyderabad, returned to Karachi,
the hub of commerce in Pakistan, and then went to Lahore, the Punjab provincial
capital, where they spent five days before going to Sargodha, he said.
One member of the group, whom he identified as Umar Farouq,
was originally from Sargodha and allegedly maintained links with the Islamic
extremist organization where the five sought to enlist, he said, without going
into detail.
Several Islamic militant organizations are known to operate
in Sargodha, including the extremists Sipah-e-Sahaba and a splinter group,
Lashkar-e-Jhangvi. Both are Sunni Muslim groups that have targeted minority
Shiite Muslims but have also been linked to al-Qaida and the Pakistani Taliban.
Al-Qaida, whose leaders are primarily Arabs, and the
Pakistani Taliban, led by ethnic Pashtuns, are based in the country’s
Pashtun-dominated tribal region bordering Afghanistan. They have spearheaded an
insurgency that has killed and maimed thousands of people in suicide bombings
and other attacks since 2007.
Many experts are concerned about cooperation between the
Pakistani Taliban, al-Qaida and militant groups based in southern Punjab who
were once used by Pakistani security services to wage a proxy war on India’s
side of the disputed Kashmir region.
The FBI said in a statement it was trying to determine if
the five men were the same as five students from Washington’s northern Virginia
suburbs whose families reported them missing last month. The U.S. official
confirmed, however, they’re the same individuals, as did Ibrahim Hooper, a
spokesman for the Washington-based Council on American-Islamic Relations, a
Muslim American advocacy organization to which their families turned for help.
CAIR arranged a Dec. 1 meeting for the families with Islamic
leaders in northern Virginia, who then contacted the FBI, said Hooper, who
declined to give further details of the case.
The U.S. official said there were no apparent links between
the five men and another American, David Coleman Headley, who pleaded not
guilty Wednesday in a Chicago federal court to charges he helped a Pakistani
group, Lashkar-e-Taiba, plot last year’s terrorist strike on India’s financial
capital, Mumbai, which killed 166 people, including six Americans.
Headley, who was arrested in October, has also been indicted
on charges of plotting an attack on a Danish newspaper that published a
controversial cartoon of the Prophet Mohammed.
In another case linked to Pakistan, U.S. authorities in
September arrested a Colorado airport van driver, Najibullah Zazi, and charged
him with receiving explosives training from al-Qaida in Pakistan’s tribal area
and conspiring to carry out a bomb attack in New York.
Via McClatchy-Tribune News Service.
