NEW YORK, Oct 26: Muslim groups in the United States expressed relief on Thursday when police officials announced that the two men suspected of sniper attacks in Washington D.C area had acted on their own and not as part of a larger group or any Muslim organization.

Police arrested the two — 41-year-old John Allan Muhammad and 17-year-old John Lee Malvo — sleeping in a car at a highway rest stop in rural Maryland.

“It appears that these people that have been taken into custody are not acting with any group or with any organized group of people. It appears that they have acted on their own,” said Bellingham police chief Randy Carroll.

Bellingham (Washington State) is about 130 kms north of Seattle, where the men once lived.

Police officials were quoted as saying on Thursday that there was no Al Qaeda connection to the two suspects.

However, as the day unfolded it became clear that John Allen Muhammad, who converted to Islam as propagated by Nation of Islam, did not belong to any extremist group.

In an interview with a Seattle-based television, a former friend who met the two men while working out at a YMCA said they had talked about the decline of America and plans to kill police.

“They showed me the blueprint of silencer and silencer itself. Then that made me really concerned that they are up to something big,” said Harjeet Singh in Bellingham.

Felix Strozier, who told Seattle media he opened a karate school in Tacoma, Washington, with Muhammad, described him as a proud, clean-living man who grew bitter for some reason.

“There’s something that happened in John’s life that has created this, because this is totally out of character for him,” Strozier told KING-5 television.

Officials said Muhammad and his companion John Lee Malvo, 17, were chief suspects in the case but so far Muhammad, a Gulf war veteran and expert marksman with four children, was charged with gun possession, violating a restraining order filed by one of his two ex-wives.