Jihad Dvd Find Foiled Terror Plot, Says Fbi

A plot by alleged radical Islamists against a military base in the US was foiled when they took a DVD of them firing assault weapons to a shop in New Jersey for copying, the US authorities said yesterday.

The five men, originally from the Balkans, Turkey and Jordan, were arrested on Monday night at Cherry Hill, New Jersey, and charged yesterday with conspiracy to murder US soldiers. It is alleged that one boasted they would kill "at least 100 soldiers". The US authorities said the group had serious intent but were not thought to have any link with al-Qaida or any other international terrorist organisation.

A sixth man has been charged with aiding and abetting the illegal possession of weapons, which carries a maximum sentence of 10 years in jail. The arrests, made when the group was allegedly trying to buy seven rifles, will reopen debate about the threat posed by would-be terrorists in the US and immigration. Three of the six were said to be illegal immigrants.

The FBI said the men took a video of themselves firing weapons and shouting "jihad" to the shop in January last year. A worker became suspicious when he viewed the DVD and told the FBI, who described him as an "unsung hero". The FBI kept them under surveillance and infiltrated two informers into the group. It said they had trained with guns in the woods of the Poconos mountains, Pennsylvania.

The attorney's office in New Jersey said the group had looked at targets including a naval base in Philadelphia and a football match, but decided on Fort Dix, the main mobilisation point on the east coast. The attorney's office said one of them had delivered pizzas to the base and claimed he knew it like the back of his hand, identifying a spot that would cut off the electricity supply. They are alleged to have been planning to use rocket-propelled grenades and automatic weapons. In a secret recording, one of the men is alleged to have said: "My intent is to hit a heavy concentration of soldiers. You hit four, five or six Humvees and light the whole place [up] and retreat completely without any losses."

Jody Weiss, the FBI agent in charge of the investigation, said: "Today we dodged a bullet. And looking at the weapons they were trying to obtain, we dodged a lot of bullets. We had a group that was forming a platoon to take on an army. They identified their target, they did their reconnaissance. They had maps. And they were in the process of buying weapons."

The three illegal immigrants are Dritan Duka, 28, an ethnic Albanian from the former Yugoslavia, and his brothers, Eljvir, 23, and Shain Duka, 26. The others are Serdar Tatar, 23, from Turkey, and Mohamad Ibrahim Shnewer, 22, from Jordan. Agron Abdullahu, 24, an ethnic Albanian from the former Yugoslavia, is charged with aiding and abetting.