WASHINGTON: A Mississippi couple has been charged with conspiring and attempting to provide material support to the Daesh militant group, the Department of Justice said on Tuesday.

Jaelyn Delshaun Young, 20, and Muhammad Oda Dakhlalla, 22, were arrested during the weekend, the department said.

According to prosecutors, both of them planned to travel to Syria to join the group and were arrested before boarding a flight at Golden Triangle Regional Airport in Columbus, Mississippi.

If convicted, the duo face up to 20 years in prison.

Both were denied bond during a court hearing on Tuesday in Oxford, Mississippi, according to prosecutors.

The Mississippi arrests follow a recent wave of US prosecutions involving individuals accused of trying to aid Daesh.

Not guilty to bomb charge

In Miami, a self-professed supporter of the Daesh pleaded not guilty Tuesday to charges he plotted to set off a backpack bomb on a Florida beach.

Harlem Suarez, 23, from Key West, Florida and a son of Cuban immigrants, is seeking a jury trial, his lawyer Richard Della Fera told reporters after the hearing in federal court.

Suarez was arrested in July after acquiring material to make a backpack bomb he planned to detonate on a beach in Key West, according to court documents.

Suarez is charged with “knowingly attempting to use a weapon of mass destruction against a person or property within the United States.”

He had been under investigation by the FBI since April after he made Facebook postings with extremist language supporting the Daesh.

Della Fera said he would seek a psychiatric evaluation of Suarez, whom he described as naive and “foolish.

Relatives and friends of the defendants have described him as impressionable and inclined to believe everything he reads on the Internet.

Suarez faces life in prison if convicted.

Dozens of people have been arrested in recent months in the United States for trying to abet or join Daesh, a jihadist organization, which controls broad stretches of territory in Iraq and Syria.

Meanwhile, the Jordanian father of a New Jersey man who allegedly plotted with others to fight alongside Daesh says his son had “no serious intentions” to join the group.

Khader Saadeh said on Tuesday, a day after his 20-year-old son Nader was charged in New Jersey with attempting to provide services and personnel to the militants.

The group controls a third of both Iraq and Syria.

Khader Saadeh says his older son Alaa — charged in the same plot — had told the family Nader might travel to Syria via Turkey to join Daesh.

Saadeh says Nader came to Jordan instead, a sign his son had “no serious intentions” to join.

He says Nader had been detained in Jordan since May.