The FBI arrested six people in an alleged plot to kill scores of soldiers at Ft. Dix, N.J., that unraveled because a store clerk became suspicious and alerted authorities, federal officials said Tuesday.
The clerk told the FBI that one of the suspects had brought a “disturbing” videotape to copy onto a DVD, authorities said. The video reportedly shows the six suspected Islamic radicals and four others firing assault weapons and calling for jihad.
After the tip from the unnamed clerk, an informant infiltrated the group in March 2006, the FBI said, and began recording his conversations with one of the suspects.
“If you want to do anything here, there is Ft. Dix and I don’t want to exaggerate, and I assure that you can hit an American base very easily,” one man told an FBI informant, according to the FBI. “You take a map and draw it and then you calculate that there are areas where there are 100 to 200 individuals. …
“My intent is to hit a heavy concentration of soldiers,” the man on the tape said. “You hit four, five or six Humvees and light the whole place up.”
The defendants are all men in their 20s originally from the former Yugoslavia, Jordan and Turkey.
“Today we dodged a bullet,” said Jody Weis, the senior FBI agent in Philadelphia. “In fact, we dodged a lot of bullets. The unsung hero is that store clerk.”
A Justice Department spokesman in Washington noted that none of the suspects is charged with terrorism crimes.
“We have no indication that they were receiving direction from a foreign terrorist organization,” said Justice Department spokesman Dean Boyd. “However, they were engaged in weapons training, surveilled targets and discussed killing large numbers of servicemen, and so that certainly warranted a strong law-enforcement response.”
The plotters also targeted Dover Air Force Base in Delaware, but determined it was too well-guarded to attack, the FBI said.
Though one official said that “these guys were absolutely serious,” a legal expert cautioned about attaching too much significance to the arrests.
The federal government’s strategy to aggressively intervene early with any suspected terrorism plot, no matter how small, has sometimes resulted in prosecutions that failed to live up to their initial billing.
Expert: Not quite ‘A-team’
“The fact is that most of those arrested [in the past] are small fry and wannabes,” said Daniel Benjamin, a terrorism expert and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington.
Benjamin said he knew too little about the New Jersey case to draw a conclusion about the seriousness of the threat. But the fact that the men took a video of themselves firing assault weapons to a store for copying onto DVDs, he said, “somewhat indicates they weren’t the A-team of terrorists.”
During an initial appearance in federal court Tuesday afternoon, U.S. Magistrate Judge Joel Schneider ordered the six men detained without bail.
The men entered court in green jumpsuits and were shackled around the ankles. One of the men, Eljvir Duka, smiled and waved at relatives in the gallery.
Several women in the front row wept as the defendants entered the courtroom. No pleas were entered Tuesday.
While training for their alleged Ft. Dix mission in the Poconos in February, some of the men allegedly discussed a planned attack on two American warships that were supposedly going to be docked in Philadelphia next year, the FBI said.
During a meeting March 16, also apparently recorded by the FBI, one of the men said:
“You know where the stadiums are in Philadelphia? There is the Navy base and every year they have the Army-Navy [football] game and they come and stay one or two weeks. The Navy base will then be full of people. You see this is an opportunity and the beauty of this location specifically if you have the proper weaponry, is that you can hit it.”
Four of the men charged have been living in Cherry Hill, N.J., near Philadelphia and are from the former Yugoslavia: Mohamad Shnewer and brothers Dritan, Eljvir and Shain Duka.
The others charged are Serdar Tatar of Philadelphia and Agron Abdullahu of Williamstown, N.J. One was born in Jordan, one in Turkey.
If convicted, the five charged with plotting to kill the servicemen face up to life in prison, said Assistant U.S. Atty. William Fitzpatrick. Abdullahu is charged only with aiding and abetting, and faces a shorter sentence if convicted.
According to an affidavit from FBI agent John Ryan, the store clerk called the FBI on Jan. 31, 2006, and said that someone had brought a “disturbing” video to have duplicated.
“The DVD depicted 10 young men who appeared to be in their early 20s shooting assault weapons at a firing range in a militia-like style while calling for jihad and shouting in Arabic, ‘Allah Akbar,’ or ‘God is Great.’
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Informants sent to group
In March 2006, the FBI got an informant to match up with the group.
On a laptop computer belonging to one suspect, the FBI found a file labeled “19,” and “what appears to be the last will and testament of at least two of the hijackers” in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, the FBI said.
On July 29, a second FBI informant recorded a meeting with the three Dukas and Shnewer, during which they watched videos on the laptop that included “armed attacks on and the killing of U.S. military personnel,” the FBI said.
Three days later, the FBI said, the informant recorded a meeting with Shnewer during which he said the six were part of a “group that was planning to attack a U.S. military base.”
“Shnewer explained that they could utilize six or seven jihadists to attack and kill at least 100 soldiers by using rocket-propelled grenades,” the FBI said.
Carolee Nisbet, a public information officer at Ft. Dix, said: “I understand that they weren’t just targeting Ft. Dix, that it was a multiple-base plan to attack several bases in the Northeast.” She declined to elaborate.
Some of the six men tried to purchase automatic weapons from a local gun dealer before the arrests, sources said.
Tatar provided the group with a map to the base, a federal official said. Authorities also said Tuesday that Tatar used a pizza delivery job — at his father’s eatery — to scout Ft. Dix.
Their citizenship status could not be confirmed Tuesday morning, but several are believed to be naturalized U.S. citizens.
A successful attack on Ft. Dix is considered to be highly unlikely. Armed soldiers guard every gate, whose approaches have curbs or barriers that force traffic to slowly snake as they get near.
The soldiers perform “a 100 percent identification check” and conduct random vehicle searches, Nisbet said.
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‘You go jihad
Statements from the suspects accused of planning an attack on Ft. Dix, N.J., as alleged in the complaint unsealed Tuesday in federal court:
“At the end, when it comes to defending your religion, when someone … attacks your religion, your way of life, then you go jihad.”
— Eljvir Duka
“It doesn’t matter to me, whether I get locked up, arrested, or get taken away … Or I die, doesn’t matter, I’m doing it in the name of Allah.”
— Serdar Tatar
“When you go to a military base, you need mortars and RPGs [rocket-propelled grenades].”
— Mohamad Shnewer