SARGODHA, Pakistan: Five Americans suspected of using the Internet to contact militant groups to carry out terrorist attacks told a Pakistani court on Monday they had only wanted to give fellow Muslims financial and medical aid.
The students, in their 20s and from the US state of Virginia, were detained last month. Police officials said e-mails showed they had contacted the Taleban, and that the group had planned to use them for attacks in Pakistan.
The suspects appeared at an anti-terrorism court and were remanded until Jan. 18, said defense lawyer Mohammad Amir Khan.
“The five men denied having been in contact with Al-Qaeda, Jaish-e-Mohammad (a Pakistani militant group) or any other militant group,” he said after the hearing.
“They told the court they wanted to go to Afghanistan to help their Muslim brothers, like those needing medical or financial assistance, and had no plans to carry out any activity in Pakistan.”
Police told the court the five men were in contact with an Al-Qaeda operative identified as Saifullah, Khan said.
Police have said they would seek a life sentence for the men.
“They had deep interest in the religion and they were of the opinion that a jihad must be waged against the infidels for the atrocities committed by them against Muslims around the world,” said a police interrogation report last month.
It showed pictures of a clip of a suicide attack on a US convoy in Kabul posted on YouTube.
The report said suspect Ahmed Abdullah Minni regularly visited the YouTube site and used to praise such videos. Shortly after Minni became a registered YouTube user he was contacted by Saifullah, said the report.
The case has illustrated how easy it is for anyone to pursue dreams of joining jihad through cyberspace, a worrying reality for US ally Pakistan, already struggling on the ground against Taleban insurgents.
It also underscores increasingly complex security challenges in the US-led global “war on terror.”
The five Americans were arrested in Sargodha, home to one of Pakistan’s biggest airbases, 190 km southeast of Islamabad.
The men — two are of Pakistani ancestry, one of Egyptian, one of Yemeni and one of Eritrean — have not been charged.
They were found with maps and had intended to travel through northwest Pakistan to an Al-Qaeda and Taleban militant stronghold on the Afghan border, officials have said.
Pakistan’s Pashtun tribal lands bordering Afghanistan are known sanctuaries for Al-Qaeda and Taleban militants who fled the US-led assault on Afghanistan after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks in the United States.
The court ordered the release of Khalid Farooq, father of Pakistani suspect Umar Farooq, one of the Americans, after police said they did not find any evidence against him.
