 Two men from Atlanta already accused of discussing targets for bomb attacks in the United States have been indicted by a grand jury in Georgia on charges of receiving paramilitary training and plotting a "violent jihad" against civilian and U.S. government targets. The two, 21-year-old Syed Ahmed and Ehsanul Islam Sadequee, 19, are also said to have links to some of the 12 men and five youths arrested in the Toronto area last month and accused of plotting bombings and kidnappings in southern Ontario. Both men are U.S. citizens.
The grand jury indictment says Ahmed and Sadequee went to Washington, D.C. last April and filmed the U.S. Capitol building and the headquarters of the World Bank, allegedly seeing them as potential targets for a bombing campaign. Both men have pleaded not guilty to earlier charges and their lawyers say the government's case against them is "shallow and inconsequential." At the time of the arrests of the 17 suspects in the Toronto area in early June, the FBI said that Ahmed and Sadequee had travelled to Canada earlier in the year to meet with some of those accused in the Toronto case. Sadequee told the FBI that he had an aunt in Toronto, but agents said he was unable to give her full name, or other details about her family.| "She wore a chador most days, I never really got to know her..." |
An FBI affidavit obtained by the Canadian Press earlier this year says much of the case against the two men comes from a lengthy interrogation of Ahmed after he was arrested in March. At the time, he had just returned from a trip to Pakistan, which the FBI said was for paramilitary training, but Ahmed's family says was for religious studies.| Which are one and the same, for the most part. |
|