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 Muhanad Mahmoud Al Farekh, who was detained in Pakistan and
recently transferred into U.S. custody, was clad in blue jail garb
and sporting short brown hair and a long beard as he made a brief
court appearance in Brooklyn.
His court-appointed lawyer, Sean Maher, made no request for bail and
did not enter a plea on Farekh's behalf but asked that he be given
medical attention while detained.
In a complaint filed in court earlier, prosecutors said Farekh was
charged with conspiracy to provide material support to terrorists.
The Justice Department said in a statement that Farekh had been
deported from Pakistan to the United States and arrested on a
pending warrant that was unsealed on Thursday.
The complaint said that Farekh, who was born in Texas, had conspired
with others to provide personnel to be used by al Qaeda in support
of efforts to kill American citizens and members of the U.S.
military abroad.
The document said that in or around 2007, Farekh, a man named Ferid
Imam and a third unnamed individual, all of whom were students at
the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, Canada, decided to leave
school and travel to tribal areas along Pakistan's border with
Afghanistan to train with al Qaeda.
According to the Justice Department, in September 2008 Ferid Imam
also provided military-style training at an al Qaeda camp in
Pakistan to Najibullah Zazi and two other men later convicted of
plotting a suicide bombing of the New York City subway system.
The complaint says two cooperating witnesses who provided U.S.
investigators with evidence against Farekh had been involved in the
subway attack plot.
The document said that before leaving for Pakistan, Farekh and his
alleged co-conspirators frequently viewed videos promoting violent
jihad, including online lectures by Anwar Al-Awlaki, the U.S.-born,
Yemen-based militant preacher affiliated with al Qaeda in the
Arabian Peninsula who was killed in a U.S. drone attack in 2011.
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Karen Greenberg, a Fordham University counterterrorism expert, said
this is one of the first U.S. cases recently involving al Qaeda's
Pakistan-based core group, with most others involving suspects
allegedly connected to Syria-based Islamic State militants.
A federal law enforcement official said that in the last two years,
the Justice Department's National Security division has filed
criminal charges against more than 30 individuals - most of them
U.S. citizens or residents - for providing support to terrorists.
In a separate case, also in New York on Thursday, two women were
arrested in an alleged conspiracy to build a bomb and wage a
"terrorist attack" in the United States.
A federal criminal complaint said the women, both U.S. citizens and
alleged al Qaeda and Islamic State sympathizers, devised a plot to
target police, government or military targets based on their
"violent jihadi beliefs."
(Additional reporting Mark Hosenball and Emily Stephenson in
Washington; Editing by Will Dunham, Tom Brown and Ted Botha)
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