NEW YORK, Aug 5: A Maryland man, Mahmud Faruq Brent, was arrested on Thursday in Newark, New Jersey, and charged with conspiring to aid terrorism by training to become a jihadi fighter in camps in Pakistan, said a report in the New York Times.
Mr Brent was accused of travelling to Pakistan after the Sept 11, 2001, attacks to receive training in camps operated by the Lashkar-i-Taiba, the report said. Mr Brent’s home in Baltimore was searched on Thursday afternoon by agents of the local Joint Terrorism Taskforce.
He made his first court appearance later in a federal district court in Manhattan. Mr Brent, who the authorities said also went by the name of Mahmud Al Mutazzim, was an associate of Tarik Shah, a New York jazz musician who was arrested on May 28 on terrorism charges in a federal sting operation, according to the newspaper.
According to a criminal complaint against Mr Brent, which was unsealed on Thursday, Mr Brent, in telephone calls and at least one meeting, had described his stay in the camps to Mr Shah. He had told Mr Shah that he had been in the mountains in Pakistan training with “the mujahideen, the fighters,” the complaint says.
The complaint says that Mr Shah had trained Mr Brent in martial arts when the two lived in Beacon, New York, in 2001, before the Sept 11 attacks. In recent months, the two men had discussed plans to make a martial arts training video for Muslims in the United States interested in becoming militants, the complaint says.
