Sixth Man Arrested in Buffalo Terror-Cell Bust

September 16, 2002

BUFFALO, N.Y.  — A sixth member of the alleged upstate New York terror cell was arrested in Bahrain last week and will be arraigned in Buffalo Monday afternoon, Fox News has learned. 

An anonymous Bahraini official said the man had been arrested in the Gulf state, as part of a coordinated effort by U.S. and Bahraini authorities, after traveling there with his two sons to get married. 

In response to news reports of the arrests Monday morning, Peter Ahearn, an FBI Special Agent in Buffalo, N.Y., said "I cannot confirm that report." 

Dr. Khalid J. Qazi, president of the American Muslim Council of Western New York, identified the sixth suspect arrested as Mukhtar al-Bakri. 

"I verified that he has been arrested overseas, flown here and is in the detention center in Batavia," Qazi told the Buffalo News. That center, 35 miles northeast of Buffalo, is the INS facility where the other men are being held. Qazi refused to say how he verified the arrest. 

Meanwhile, Buffalo prosecutors revealed that the five men arrested over the weekend on suspicion of being Al Qaeda members had been watched by authorities since before the Sept. 11 terror attacks, but recent developments had prompted their immediate arrests. 

"What essentially happened is that information came to our attention that pointed us in the direction of these individuals," said Michael Battle, U.S. attorney for western New York. He would not specify further. 

Battle said the probe into the alleged ring started in the early summer of 2001, when the five, all U.S.-born men of Yemeni descent, returned from Taliban-controlled Afghanistan to Lackawanna, N.Y., 5 miles south of Buffalo. 

Four of the men were arrested Friday and a fifth was arrested Saturday. Federal agents said they had no information the cell was planning an attack in the United States. 

The five men appeared in a Buffalo courtroom Saturday in handcuffs and shackles and were charged with 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. 

According to the criminal complaint unsealed by the judge Saturday, the five -- 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. 

Lackawanna is home to a large Yemeni-American community, and while authorities would not officially confirm it, indications were that significant information contributing to the arrests had come from within the community. 

Usama bin Laden, who authorities said addressed the suspects while they were in Kandahar, Afghanistan, is himself the 19th son of a Yemeni former slave who rose to fortune and prominence in 1950s Saudi Arabia. 

Ahearn said Saturday that the investigation was continuing, and he appealed for help from anyone who might have information. He said authorities believe the key figures in western New York have been caught. 

Ahearn said the group was an Al Qaeda-trained cell. 

"They worked together, they socialized together, they lived within blocks of each other," Ahearn said. "It's a trained group of individuals that were trained in Afghanistan." 

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 one-year anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks. 

FBI Special Agent Edward Needham wrote in the criminal complaint that unindicted co-conspirators told him Goba, Alwan, Mosed and Taher attended Al Qaeda's al-Farooq terror training camp near Kandahar, where they were trained to use Kalashnikov assault rifles, handguns and long-range rifles. 

During the training camp, the men were lectured on "Jihad [holy war], prayers and justification for using suicide as a weapon," according to Needham's affidavit. 

It was the same camp John Walker Lindh attended, but officials declined to say if Lindh assisted with the investigation. U.S. authorities hope to soon arrest the three co-conspirators, Battle said. He said the three, who were not named, are not in the United States but are American citizens. 

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