NEW YORK, Aug 20: The arrest of three Muslims in an alleged terror plot in Los Angeles has put the focus on religious instruction given to inmates in the California’s state corrections system, a newspaper said on Saturday. In a report the Los Angeles Times said that Islamic extremism is a potential danger in California’s state prisons, but added that it can be mitigated by closely monitoring inmates and carefully and consistently screening Muslim chaplains, say Muslim clerics, scholars and prison officials.

One of the two suspects converted to Islam while serving time at Folsom state prison. Police staked out the pair and were led to a Pakistani national Hammad Riaz Samana. Sources familiar with a federal investigation of the trio say they are suspected of planning to stage a series of terrorist attacks in California. Federal investigators suspect that an Islamist prison gang, called Jamiyyat Ul Islam Is Saheeh, or Assembly of Authentic Islam, may have links to three Muslim men recently implicated in a possible plot to attack National Guard Recruitment Centres in California, the newspaper said. US federal authorities are also investigating links between Muslim inmates and extremist Muslim groups in and outside the prison system. Militant Muslims have been of concern to prison officials since the Nation of Islam, a black separatist group, gained popularity among African American convicts in the 1960s.

Federal authorities are investigating Islamic radicalism in state prisons, and California Department of Corrections officials are facing a barrage of questions about the effectiveness of their Muslim chaplaincy programme the paper said.

The Corrections Department has a policy of hiring Muslim chaplains who are endorsed by an established board of Islamic leaders to minister to inmates. But in practice, each institution has wide latitude the report said.

Some prisons have full-time chaplains vetted by Muslim leaders. Others have hired chaplains on a more informal and part-time basis or invite volunteers to preach to Muslim inmates, Muslim chaplains told the paper.

A 2004 US Department of Justice study reported that about 6 per cent of the nation’s 150,000 federal inmates were Muslims, and the majority of them were African American converts.