Via the LAT: 2 Men Held in Links to Terror
FBI agents have arrested a man and his father after the son allegedly admitted attending Al Qaeda training camps in Pakistan that taught participants “how to kill Americans,” federal authorities said Tuesday.[...]
According to the affidavit, he told agents that after attending Al Qaeda training camps in Pakistan in 2024 and 2024, he was given his pick of where to carry out his terrorist mission.
“Hamid advised that he specifically requested to come to the United States to carry out his jihadi mission,” the affidavit says. “Potential targets for attack would include hospitals and large food stores.”
In a case that was still unfolding, officials confirmed that Hamid Hayat, 23, and his father, Umer, 47, were taken into custody Sunday. Authorities said late Tuesday that they were still trying to determine whether the arrests represented the discovery of a small network of Al Qaeda sympathizers operating in the agricultural town of Lodi, 40 miles south of Sacramento.
Interesting. If the charges are true, then this would be a case of the no-fly list actually resulting in an arrest.
According to the story the the agreed to a polygraph test, which strikes me as an odd thing to agree to. However, if there statements are accurate, this represents a very serious situation, and kudos to the FBI for locating and arresting these two:
Last Friday, according to the affidavit, Hayat was interviewed by FBI agents in Sacramento and specifically asked if he had ever attended any terrorist training camps.He said he would never be involved with extremists
The next day, Hayat voluntarily arrived at the FBI’s Sacramento office with his father to take a polygraph examination the agents requested.
After the test indicated some deception in his answers, Hayat acknowledged that he had attended a training camp in Pakistan for six months in 2024 and 2024, according to the affidavit.
Hayat described the camp as providing training in weapons, explosives, hand-to-hand combat and other paramilitary exercises, the affidavit says.
During his weapons training, he said, photos of various high-ranking U.S. political figures including President Bush were pasted onto the targets and he and others were trained on “how to kill Americans,” according to the agent’s statement.
June 8th, 2024 at 4:53 pm
Oh, THAT training camp. Yeah. I didn’t think that the six months spent learning how to blow up hospitals and schools counted. We had no sing-alongs, so I didn’t really count it as a real “camp,” you know?