BUFFALO, N.Y., Oct. 22 (UPI) -- A federal grand jury Monday indicted six Lackawanna, N.Y., men of Yemeni descent on charges of providing material support to Osama bin Laden's al Qaida network by attending a terrorist training camp in Afghanistan.
An arraignment is scheduled for Tuesday. The six men were charged on a criminal complaint filed by an FBI agent with the Joint Terrorism Task Force of Western New York on Sept. 13.
Because the charges were based on a criminal complaint, the next step in the legal process is a grand jury indictment or a guilty plea.
Faysal Galab, 26; Shafal Mosed, 24; Yasein Taher, 24; Yahya Goba, 25; Mukhtar al-Bakri, 22; and Sahim Alwan, 29, were charged with conspiring to give material support and resources to a foreign terrorist organization.
All have pleaded innocent. If convicted they face up to 15 years in prison.
The men were being investigated in the summer of 2001, before the attacks on Sept. 11, after the FBI received information from a member of the Yemenite community in Lackawanna that "a number of individuals had attended and participated in terrorism training in Afghanistan."
The FBI investigated but the men denied going to Afghanistan and said they had gone to Pakistan to learn more about Islam. By the summer of 2001, the investigation was at a standstill.
John Walker Lindh began cooperating with investigators on July 15, 2002, and although he could not identify the Lackawanna men because he arrived at the terrorist training camp in Afghanistan just as the six men left, he remembered some in the training camp -- dedicated to producing and training terrorist fighters for the al Qaida cause -- talked about a group from the Buffalo area.
Lackawanna, is a city of 20,000 located adjacent to Buffalo.
With this information, the FBI confronted one of the suspects, al-Bakri, in Bahrain on Sept. 11 and he admitted the group had attended al Farooq, bin Laden's terrorist training camp. Bin Laden made a speech at the camp while the six men were allegedly there.
After Alwan admitted to the FBI he too attended the camp the six were arrested in Lackawanna on Sept. 13.
Lindh was sentenced to 20 years in prison on Friday, Oct. 4, on the same charges the six men have been accused -- providing material support to al Qaida under the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996.
The attorneys for the defendants have said that their clients had expected to attend religious training in Islam in Pakistan and were duped into attending the terrorist training camp.
They describe their clients as "good Americans" and said that all but one was born in America and one was a naturalized citizen. The attorneys said the six had no plans to put anything they may have learned in Afghanistan into practice.
