Background
| “ | When one of the men...bought propane tanks at a local hardware store, the agents immediately thought they had discovered a bomb plot. In fact, they discovered a plan for a family barbecue. | ” |
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—Dina Temple-Raston, The Jihad Next Door |
They traveled to Afghanistan in spring 2001, before the September 11 attacks, while the country was still ruled by the Taliban, who were then giving sanctuary to Osama bin Laden, who in turn used it as a base for Al Qaeda training.
In June 2001, an anonymous two-page handwritten letter was received from an individual ostensibly living in Lackawanna who knew the Yemeni population intimately. It warned "I am very concern. I am an Arab-American... and I cannot give you my name because I fear for my life. Two terrorist came to Lackawanna... for recruiting the Yemenite youth... the terrorist group... left to Afghanistan to meet... bin Laden and stay in his camp for training", and gave the names of twelve local youths.
The group visited what later became known in the American media as the "al-Farooq terrorist training camp." In the late summer of 2002, one of the members, Mukhtar al-Bakri, sent an e-mail message in which he described his upcoming wedding and another in which he mentioned a "big meal" after the wedding, which is tradition in Islam. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), who were monitoring him, sounded the alarm and al-Bakri was arrested by Bahrainian police on the date of his wedding in September 2002. They found him in his hotel room with his new wife, preparing to consummate his marriage, and stunned at the commando team that now held him at gunpoint.
The other five were arrested in Lackawanna, New York, a suburb of Buffalo, New York in September 2002. On September 14, 2002, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) held a press conference in Buffalo to announce the arrests of five of the local Al Qaeda suspects. The FBI Special Agent in charge of the investigation, Peter Ahearn (At the time head of the FBI's Buffalo Field Office), stated that there was no specific event triggering the arrests, which followed four to eight months of investigations. Later, FBI counterterrorism chief Dale Watson told The New York Times that the bureau's response was that "we are probably 99 percent sure that we can make sure these guys don't do something – if they are planning to do something." Watson paraphrased the President's response as that "under the rules that we were playing under at the time, that's not acceptable. So a conscious decision was made, 'Let's get 'em out of here'".
Read more about this topic: Buffalo Six
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