Newark, New Jersey: Authorities say two New Jersey men who intended to kill American troops were arrested at a New York City airport before boarding flights on their way to join a jihadist group in Somalia.
Federal authorities say 20-year-old Mohamed Mahmood Alessa and 24-year-old Carlos Eduardo Almonte were arrested on Saturday at John F Kennedy Airport before they could board separate flights to Egypt and then continue on to Somalia.
Alessa, of North Bergen, and Almonte, of Elmwood Park, were charged with conspiring to commit an act of international terrorism.
Teams of state and federal law enforcement agents who have been investigating Alessa and Almonte since 2006 took them into custody. They are scheduled to appear Monday in federal court in Newark.
The arrests were made as part of an investigation known as Operation Arabian Knight. Authorities said an undercover NYPD officer had infiltrated the suspects' group of friends and was able to monitor their consumption of jihadist videos and literature, overseas travel preparations, and purchase of airline tickets.
The two men had planned their trip Somalia for several months, saving thousands of dollars, undergoing tactical training and test runs at paintball fields to condition themselves physically, and acquiring equipment and clothing they could use when they joined al-Shabaab in Somalia, the officials said. Both had bragged about wanting to wage holy war against the United States both at home and internationally, investigators said.
Officials said the two men were not planning an imminent attack in the New York-New Jersey area. Both are American citizens, the officials said.
Also Saturday, FBI agents sealed off Alessa's street in his neighborhood at around 10:30 p.m., and FBI agents, local police and the NYPD descended on his home, the newspaper reported. North Bergen police would say only that an investigation was in progress.
Twenty cars with agents and police came to Almonte's home at around 11 p.m., with agents searching the outside of his house and a detached garage, the newspaper reported.
Somalia, an impoverished East African nation of about 10 million people, has not had a functioning government for more than a decade, although the U.S. is backing a transitional government there. The Pentagon's top commander in the region has included Somalia on a list of countries where clandestine American military operations designed to disrupt militant groups would be targeted.
The arrests follow two failed terrorist attacks in the U.S. in recent months: an alleged attempted car bombing in Times Square by Pakistani-American Faisal Shahzad last month, and the alleged attempted Christmas Day bombing of a Detroit-bound airliner by Nigerian Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab.
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