From CAN:The five Americans arrested in Pakistan on their way to try to get training from the Taliban and Al-Qaeda wanted to bomb the Chashma nuclear power plant and other sites in Pakistan, The Daily Times of Pakistan reports.
The aspiring terrorists came from the northern Virginia and Washington D.C. areas.
TIME Magazine reported in December when the arrests occurred that the group was arrested by Pakistani police in Sargodha owned by one of the suspects’ uncle. This uncle belonged to the Jaish-e-Mohammed terrorist group, which according to ABC News, originally rejected the five men as did Jamaat ud-Dawa, a group that’s connected to the Lashkar-e-Taiba group that carried out the Mumbai bombings.
The Americans were not rejected because the two terrorist groups disagreed with their objectives, but because they could not provide references from other members.
However, terrorism experts caution that Pakistani and Kashmiri terrorist groups often collaborate with the Taliban and Al-Qaeda and could also be a source of “homegrown” terrorism. For example, in 2004, a man in Colorado was deported after it was learned that he had received training at a camp operated by Jaish-e-Mohammed.
“The U.S. and British governments have both acquired overwhelming evidence that ‘homegrown’ terror cells seeking instruction at ‘real’ terror training camps frequently end up at either facilities run by LET [Lashkar-e-Taiba] or JEM,” the Investigative Project on Terrorism quoted terrorism expert Evan Kohlmann as saying.
The two aforementioned groups openly operate in Pakistan and own religious schools called madrasses.
The Pakistani government has launched military offensives against elements aligned to the Taliban but is accused of turning a blind eye to other terrorist organizations that have sympathizers in the military and intelligence service.
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