Jim Mik(lots of consonants)ski reporting from the Pentagon will report on this in a very short time.
In an interview Thursday at the U.S. military's European headquarters in Stuttgart, Germany, Sylvester said, "We believe that there was in fact an ongoing operation being planned against the United States Embassy." The six were part of an Islamic group with direct links to Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network, according to Sylvester.
He said the men had been casing the embassy and one had married the daughter of the embassy's Bosnian locksmith as part of an elaborate scheme to attack the facility. The planning for the attack apparently pre-dated the Sept. 11 strikes in the United States.
U.S. officials said one of the men, Bensayah Belkacem, 41, who used the alias Mejd, had regular contact with senior military aides to Osama bin Laden and logged dozens of phone calls to Afghanistan after Sept. 11 and before his arrest. The plan to attack the embassy apparently took on new urgency after the Sept. 11 attacks, officials said.