WASHINGTON, July 20: Two US Muslims, one of Pakistani and the other of Bangladeshi origin, have been accused of plotting to bomb institutions in the United States like the Capitol Hill and the World Bank and several other civilian and military targets.
On Wednesday, US authorities had indicted a British Muslim of South Asian origin on charges of conspiring to provide material support to terrorists and conspiring to kill, maim or injure people abroad.
The Washington Post reported that the two US Muslims, Syed Haris Ahmed, 21, and Ehsanul Islam Sadequee, 19, both based in Georgia, were also charged by a court with undergoing “physical and rudimentary paramilitary training to prepare for a violent jihad,” both overseas and in northwest Georgia.
Mr Ahmed was a naturalised US citizen born in Pakistan; Mr Sadequee was also a US citizen of Bangladeshi descent who was born in Virginia, officials said.
The four-count indictment, returned by a federal grand jury in Atlanta, adds to previous allegations against the two, who had been accused of travelling to Toronto in March 2005 to discuss attacks in the US with ‘like-minded Islamic extremists’.
The newspaper quoted US Attorney David Nahmias as saying that the suspects had not “proceeded to the point that they posed an imminent threat to the US,” but that “we no longer wait until a bomb is built and ready to explode.”
According to the indictment, the two travelled to the Washington area in April 2005 and “recorded brief ‘casing’ video clips of symbolic and infrastructure targets of potential terrorist attacks”. They included the capitol, the World Bank, the George Washington Masonic Memorial in Alexandria and a fuel storage depot in northern Virginia.
During a trip to Bangladesh to get married “and further pursue his activities in support of violent jihad,” Mr Sadequee allegedly carried a Fairfax County map that included the four sites, the indictment said.
Mr Ahmed allegedly gave the video clips to Mr Sadequee, who provided them to an alleged co-conspirator in Britain, Younis Tsouli, who stored them on computers in his home with other jihad material, the indictment says. Mr Tsouli is not charged.
In Connecticut, authorities indicted Syed Talha Ahsan, who had been arrested at his home in London on Wednesday. The US government would seek his immediate extradition.
