6th Man Charged in Terror Case

A sixth Buffalo, N.Y.-area man of Yemeni descent was charged Monday with supporting terrorism after he admitted traveling to Afghanistan and learning how to use assault weapons at an Al Qaeda training camp.

Mukhtar Al-Bakri, 22, told an FBI agent that he traveled with several other men to Pakistan in June 2001, ostensibly for religious training, court documents show. But after one of the men changed his story, Al-Bakri revealed last week that he too had spent up to seven weeks in basic training for jihad, or holy war.

Osama bin Laden, the leader of Al Qaeda, spoke to the roughly 200 soldiers in training at the Al-Farooq camp near Kandahar, Afghanistan. They heard lectures about jihad and using suicide as a weapon, and they learned how to use firearms and assault weapons--even anti-aircraft guns, according to court documents.

The men returned to the Buffalo area in the summer of 2001, and several of them were interviewed by FBI agents.

They were not suspected of taking part in the Sept. 11 attacks in New York or Washington, nor do federal agents suspect they committed any direct acts to further terrorism in the United States.

“At this point, there is no significant plot here that we have uncovered,” FBI Special Agent Peter Ahearn said at a televised news conference in Buffalo.

However, the complaint says Al-Bakri sent an e-mail on July 18 to another of the Buffalo-area men that agents “interpret as referring to possible terrorist activity.”

On Saturday, five of the men were charged under a 1996 law that makes it a crime to offer “material support” to a foreign terrorist group. Al-Bakri, who had been living recently in Bahrain in the Persian Gulf, was arrested Sunday, returned to Buffalo and charged with the same offense Monday.

U.S. attorneys say they plan to prosecute the six men in federal court under the standard rules for criminal cases. All of them will be provided with lawyers if they cannot afford one of their own.

Ahearn said the “initial tip-off” about the six alleged Al Qaeda operatives came from the local Muslim community. He also said the men had been under surveillance since before last year’s attacks.

Nonetheless, Al-Bakri was able to travel to Bahrain recently after obtaining a new passport. He admitted that he had falsely claimed to have lost his passport, apparently with the intent of concealing his travels the year before to Pakistan and Afghanistan, according to the complaint.

The 1996 law under which the Buffalo-area men have been charged is still relatively new and largely untested in the courts. It states that it is illegal to “knowingly provide material support or resources to a foreign terrorist organization.”

The Justice Department said it won its first conviction under the law in June when a jury in Charlotte, N.C., found two Lebanese men guilty of financing Hezbollah terrorists in Lebanon with the profits from a cigarette-smuggling operation. Prosecutors do not have to show that the money was used for a terrorist act or that the supplier intended it would be used for acts of violence.

Georgetown University law professor David D. Cole said the law was held to be unconstitutional in one case by the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco.

“It is very broad and it allows for guilt by association,” Cole said. “You are punishing people for supporting an organization, whether or not they intended to do anything to further terrorism.

“If these guys were part of a terrorist cell and went abroad to be trained, they ought to be prosecuted. But we don’t know yet. They might be young guys who, out of a misguided religious idealism, found themselves over there and came back with no intent of doing anything to further terrorism.”

The six men are due back in court Wednesday. Prosecutors will ask a judge to deny them bail and to hold them until their trial.