Terror Plot Bust In Massachusetts

Must be some Catholics upset about letting the Anglicans in to the Church or something.

A Massachusetts man has been arrested on charges of conspiring to support terrorists in a long-running investigation into Americans seeking military-style training overseas, federal authorities announced Wednesday morning.

Tarek Mehanna, 27, of Sudbury, a small town west of Boston, allegedly conspired from 2001 to May 2008 with Ahmad Abousamra and others to support and carry out attacks abroad, including on U.S. and allied soldiers in Iraq, the Justice Department announced.

An FBI agent alleges in a complaint and a search warrant affidavit that Mehanna, Abousamra and an associate traveled to the Middle East in February 2004 seeking training at a terrorist camp in Yemen, and that Abousamra made two similar trips to Pakistan in 2002. The men were unsuccessful, however, the agent said, and the associate became a government informant.

...The group also allegedly had several conversations about obtaining automatic rifles and randomly shooting people in a shopping mall, but abandoned the plan because they could obtain only handguns, FBI Special Agent Heidi L. Williams said.

Williams said Mehanna and the co-conspirators talked once or twice about assassinating two top U.S. elected officials. They are not charged in connection with that.

This is scary because an attack like that seems so obvious and relatively easy to carry out. It may not seem as spectacular as mass murder by airplane but a series of mall attacks right after Thanksgiving would terrorize a lot of people and do a good bit of economic damage in the process.

posted by DrewM. at 02:00 PM

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