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A Somali immigrant the government says plotted to blow up an Ohio shopping mall pleaded guilty Tuesday to conspiring to provide material support to terrorists. Nuradin Abdi, 35, entered his plea before U.S. District Judge Algenon Marbley a week before his trial had been expected to start Aug. 6. "In this climate an American jury, we felt, could potentially find him guilty because of all this negative stuff that's coming in, and if they found him guilty he was looking at spending the rest of his life in custody," said Abdi's attorney, Mahir Sherif. "The government came back with another...

Al-Qaida suspect arrested in NYC By Lisa Myers NBC NEWS NEW YORK, Aug. 4 — The FBI has arrested a Pakistani man with alleged ties to al-Qaida in New York City, NBC News has learned. THE MAN is alleged to have close ties to the mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. What most worries senior law enforcement officials is that the man is involved with the shipping industry. About four months ago, in the heart of New York’s garment district, agents from the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force arrested a young Pakistani man as he sat at his...

Federal authorities expect to file terrorism charges soon against a detained Pakistani man with ties to the shipping industry and links to a senior al Qaeda leader, law enforcement officials said yesterday. Uzair Paracha, 23, has been secretly detained as a material witness since his arrest March 31 in the offices of a New York clothing import firm owned by his father, sources said. Authorities believe the Paracha family business may have been used as cover for attempts to smuggle al Qaeda operatives or weapons into the United States, according to several sources familiar with the case. Paracha's father, who...

ne of Al Qaeda's first assignments for Iyman Faris, the Ohio truck driver named last month in a terrorist plot to destroy the Brooklyn Bridge, was to visit a travel agency while he was in Pakistan in late 2001 to have some old airline tickets reissued, federal investigators say.Because the tickets were not in his name, Mr. Faris needed an explanation to validate his request. Investigators say he used one that other Qaeda recruits have relied on to disguise their intentions: he pretended to be a member of Tablighi Jamaat, a fraternity of traveling Muslim preachers that is well known...

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- An Ohio trucker has admitted to helping plan al Qaeda attacks in the United States after meeting terror chief Osama bin Laden at an Afghanistan terror training camp. Iyman Faris, 34, checked out the chances of destroying a New York bridge and tried to buy equipment for proposed al Qaeda attacks while appearing to be a law-abiding trucker, according to documents unsealed Thursday in the U.S. District Court in Alexandria, Virginia. Faris pleaded guilty May 1 to providing material support to al Qaeda and to conspiring to do so, according to the documents. The charges together carry...

FINALLY, some good may come from the Valerie Plame kerfuffle - if Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has the stones to do what's right. A grave crime was exposed Dec. 16 when New York Times reporters James Risen and Eric Lichtblau published a story revealing President Bush authorized the National Security Agency to listen in on conversations between al-Qaeda suspects abroad and people in the United States without first obtaining a warrant. "We're seeing clearly now that [President] Bush thought 9/11 gave him license to act like a dictator," wrote Newsweek's Jonathan Alter. But the scandal was not the program Mr....

Finally, some good may come from the Valerie Plame kerfuffle -- if President Bush and Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez have the stones to do what's right. A grave crime was exposed Dec. 16th when New York Times reporters James Risen and Eric Lichtblau published a story revealing President Bush authorized the National Security Agency to listen in on conversations between al Qaida suspects abroad and people in the United States without first obtaining a warrant. "We're seeing clearly now that (President) Bush thought 9/11 gave him license to act like a dictator," wrote Newsweek's Jonathan Alter. But the scandal was...

<p>The al Qaeda Islamist militant group once planned to demolish New York's Brooklyn Bridge, blow up grounded airliners with explosive-laden vans and derail passenger trains, Newsweek magazine reported yesterday.</p> <p>Quoting federal investigators who interrogated captured al Qaeda operations chief Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the magazine said he told them he recruited a naturalized U.S. citizen, a truck driver from Columbus, Ohio, named Lyman Farris, to assess several terrorist attacks in the United States that never materialized.</p>

29 October 2003U.S. Citizen Sentenced to 20 Years in Prison for Assisting al Qaeda Justice Dept. says Iyman Faris plotted to destroy New York bridgeAn American citizen was sentenced to 20 years in prison October 28 for providing material and information support to the al Qaeda terrorist organization.According to an October 28 Department of Justice press release, Iyman Faris, an Ohio truck driver of Kashmiri origin, assessed the vulnerability of a New York City bridge to a terrorist attack, among other tasks carried out on behalf of al Qaeda."Iyman Faris -- a seemingly hard-working truck driver -- betrayed his...