July 14, 2002	Sunday	Jamadi-ul-Awwal 3, 1423

WASHINGTON, July 13: US authorities are investigating whether a US Navy reservist hosted a terrorist training camp three years ago at a remote ranch in the US state of Oregon for a sleeper cell of US-based Muslim radicals, The Los Angeles Times reported on Saturday.

The investigation by the Puget Sound Joint Terrorist Task Force produced a document suggesting that the cell members, among them a representative of Sheik Abu Hamza Al-Mazri, a leading Al Qaeda recruiter in Europe, could be trying to “identify targets for a terrorist attack,” the daily reported.

The FBI director for Seattle, Washington, Charles Mandingo, acknowledged in a statement in June that the area received “a disproportionate high number of terrorism threats.”

More than 100 people who worshipped at a Seattle mosque are under investigation by a federal grand jury, The Seattle Times reported Friday, resulting in the arrest of Navy reservist Semi Osman, 32, believed to be a national of Lebanon who was applying for US citizenship.

It was Osman, the daily reported, who owned the 65-hectare ranch where the jihad camp was allegedly held. He and his former wife, a US-born convert to Islam, raised sheep and goats in rural Bly, Oregon, a secluded town just north of the border with California, the daily reported.

Osman, arrested in May, was a leader at the abandoned Seattle mosque.—AFP