NEW YORK, Sept 15: Five American men of Arab origin were formally charged in a US federal court on Saturday with operating an active cell of Al Qaeda in Buffalo, New York.

US law enforcement officials maintained that the five men had received intensive weapons training in Afghanistan in the summer of 2001 and been sent back to the United States to await the order for an attack.

However, the US Justice Department acknowledged that it had no evidence to suggest that any attack by the group was imminent. The government did not contend that the men had weapons in their possession or that they had participated in any violent act.

“We have not seen any plans of an imminent attack in western New York or elsewhere in the United States,” the FBI director, Robert S. Mueller, said in announcing the charges. But he added, “We do not fully know the intentions of those who are charged today.”

The five Americans of Yemeni descent, Yahya Goba, 25; Sahim Alwan, 29; Shafal Mosed, 24; Yasein Taher, 24; and Faysal Galab, 26 were escorted into court in wrist and ankle chains. Only about a half-dozen friends and relatives of the defendants were present as the hearing got under way.

US officials said the arrests in a Buffalo suburb suggested that, for the first time since the Sept 11 attacks, the Justice Department might have detected an active Al Qaeda terrorist cell in the US.

The men were arrested on Friday night in raids on their homes and businesses in Lackawanna, a Buffalo suburb that has a large Yemeni community and where the suspects lived within a few blocks of one another. Officials said it was information from inside that community that led them to conduct an inquiry there.

At a news conference in Washington, Deputy Attorney General Larry D. Thompson said the disruption of an “Al Qaeda-trained terrorist cell on American soil” was an important victory for the US in combating terrorism.

“American citizens who see fit to aid and abet America’s enemies will face the full force of America’s justice,” Mr Thompson said. A US magistrate in Buffalo entered a not-guilty plea on behalf of the five men, who are all in their 20’s, and ordered them detained until a hearing on Wednesday.

Many friends and relatives of the youths said that the arrests were the result of an anti-Muslim witchhunt.

“They are good citizens and good members of the community,” Khalid Qazi, a local leader of the American Muslim Council was quoted as saying.

A criminal complaint released by the FBI shows that the government believes three other men from Lackawanna received terrorist training in Afghanistan last year. The complaint identified them as “uncharged co-conspirators” and said they were now believed to be living outside the US, at least two of them in Yemen.

The American officials said they had no evidence to suggest that the five men in custody in western New York had any tie to the Sept. 11 attacks.

The criminal complaint in their case focuses on an allegation that they provided “material support” to Al Qaeda by receiving training from the group in the summer of last year.

The US officials said that they opened their investigation in Lackawanna, (Buffalo) after receiving information from within the area’s Muslim community months ago that people loyal to Al Qaeda might be living among them.

The criminal complaint shows that it was only last week, after months of denials by the suspects, that two men accused of involvement in the terrorist cell broke down in interrogations and acknowledged to the FBI that they had attended the Afghanistan camp.

One of the men, Sahim A. Alwan, 29, arrested on Friday confessed in an interview on Thursday that he had gone to the training camp with six other men from Lackawanna last year, and that they had received training in the use of firearms and anti-aircraft guns, along with lectures on “jihad (holy war), prayers and justification for using suicide as a weapon.”

In previous interviews with the FBI, the complaint said, Mr Alwan had insisted that he had travelled last year only as far as Pakistan, where he said he had received religious training.

According to the complaint, he said that during the seven-week training session in Afghanistan, Osama bin Laden visited the camp, which was near Kandahar, and “gave a speech about the alliance of the Islamic jihad and Al Qaeda, espousing anti-United States and anti-Israel statements.”

The complaint said that the other man from Lackawanna who confessed last week, identified only as “uncharged co-conspirator C,” had been interviewed by an FBI agent on Wednesday somewhere “outside the US” and has also acknowledged terrorist training.