ACKAWANNA, N.Y., Sept 15 — The Federal Bureau of Investigation has arrested a sixth man of Yemeni descent, family and friends said here tonight, in addition to the five young American citizens charged Saturday with providing "material support" for Qaeda terrorists.
The new suspect, whose family said he was arrested in the Gulf emirate of Bahrain as he prepared for his arranged marriage there, was identified as Mukhtar al-Bakri, who lived near the other young men in the Yemeni community of this fading steel town. A federal official confirmed that a sixth arrest had been made and said it was expected to be announced Monday.
Mr. Bakri's brother, Ahmed, and his sister, who declined to give her name, said they had been notified by the F.B.I. that their brother had been arrested. A family friend, Mohammed Adulo, said he had also learned that Mr. Bakri had been arrested in Bahrain and added that the F.B.I. spent nearly seven hours late Friday searching a house here where Mr. Bakri was thought to live. They removed videotapes and other items, Mr. Adulo said.
Asked why Mr. Bakri might have been arrested, the sister replied: "We don't know, we don't have any idea. We do not think he was involved."
The five men charged Saturday were accused of undergoing weapons training at a Qaeda camp in Afghanistan in the spring and summer of 2001 — before the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon — and returning as what one federal agent called a "sleeper cell," awaiting an order for an attack on American targets.
"We have the key players in western New York," said Peter Ahearn, F.B.I. special agent in charge in Buffalo. "They worked together, they socialized together, they lived within blocks of each other. It's a trained group of individuals that were trained in Afghanistan. It's an Al Qaeda-trained cell."
But on the worn streets of this small, forlorn city just south of Buffalo, where the big Bethlehem and Republic steel mills once provided hot, hard work, members of the Yemeni community, which first arrived here in the 1920's to work in the mills, contended that their sons were regular guys, not terrorists.
Over and over, people on the streets, while wary of talking too much to the journalists who poured into town today, insisted that the five men charged Saturday were good family men, religious, and fond, above all, of playing soccer.
Those being held were identified as Shafal A. Mosed, 24; Yahya A. Goba, 25; Sahim A. Alwan, 29; Yasein A. Taher, 24; and Faysal H. Galab, 26.
In addition, the affidavit presented in court Saturday as the main part of the criminal complaint against the five mentioned "uncharged co-conspirators A, B and C." All were said to have lived here, but were now believed to be abroad.
The five had been interviewed for some months by the F.B.I. but had maintained they had gone only to Pakistan, and only for religious training. But, the affidavit said, one of three uncharged co-conspirators later recanted his story to an F.B.I. agent "outside the United States" and said the group had gone to the Qaeda camp near Kandahar. According to the affidavit, the F.B.I. then re-interviewed Mr. Alwan, who admitted they had gone to Afghanistan.
But the F.B.I. officials concede they found no weapons or explosives during their searches Friday night into Saturday morning. Officials also admit that they do not know exactly what it was that the group was supposed to do. "We do not fully know the intention of those who are charged," the F.B.I. director, Robert S. Mueller III, said at one of several news conferences on Saturday to announce the arrests. "The investigation is continuing.
"We have not seen any plan for an imminent attack in western New York or anywhere in the United States," he added.
What the five, all of whom were born here, had in common, according to the F.B.I. indictment and people in the community who knew them, was that they all went to Pakistan in the spring of 2001 to study Islamic religion and culture under the auspices of a group known in Arabic as Tablighi Jamaat.
The organization, whose name translates roughly as "Group of the Proselytizers," is described by Yemeni residents here as a kind of Islamic Jehovah's Witnesses, in that members often travel from place to place preaching a kind of revivalist message. It has an annual three-day gathering near Lahore, Pakistan, which draws one of the largest assemblies of Muslims after the annual hajj in Mecca. Last year the gathering was reported to have drawn a million people, and the group, founded in India in the 1920's, is regarded as one of the most influential Islamic movements in the world.
The group itself is not on any terrorist list. However, John Walker Lindh and Richard C. Reid, the accused shoe bomber, were reportedly drawn into terrorist activities through contact with Tablighi Jamaat.
Representatives from Tablighi Jamaat delivered a lecture at the local mosque, whose onion-shaped spires betray its origin as a Ukrainian Orthodox church of earlier immigrants, and that lecture apparently inspired the trip by the five men in custody and the three others mentioned in the F.B.I. affidavit.
Mr. Bakri too, went on what was originally said to be the trip to Pakistan to study religion, his friends and relatives said.
"I talked to them when they were thinking about going," said Mr. Adulo, the family friend. "His father didn't want him to go because he had a job and it was dangerous.
"When they went there, they wanted to study about their religion, but something else happened," he added. "They came back and they didn't look like they had studied their religion."
Mr. Bakri's sister added that he had gone to Pakistan not to join Al Qaeda, but to study religion and to see what it was like living there. She said that he did not like it in Pakistan and that he had spoken of his disdain for Osama bin Laden.
"He doesn't like Osama bin Laden," she said, "none of us do."
The young men were well known in the close-knit Yemeni community, which numbers about 1,000 in this city of 20,000. They graduated from Lackawanna High School, where several starred on the soccer team.
"They are like regular youth," said the mosque's imam, Abdulwahab Ziad. "Nice youth. We didn't hear anything bad about them. They were born here. They have children, wives, jobs."
"I am pretty sure they will say to them, `We are sorry,' too, sorry the same as in Florida," he added, referring to the three Muslim medical students whose car was searched in Florida last week. "After 17 hours they were sorry, and this case I think is the same."