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The Buffalo Six (known primarily as Lackawanna Six, but also the Lackawanna Cell, or Buffalo Cell) is a group of six Yemeni-American friends who were convicted of providing material support to Al Qaeda in December 2003, based on their having attended an Al Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan together in the Spring of 2001. They are six naturalized American citizens who were friends from childhood in Yemen:〔Temple-Raston, Dina. ''The Jihad Next Door: The Lackawanna Six and Rough Justice in the Age of Terror'', 2007〕 *Sahim Alwan *Mukhtar al-Bakri *Faysal Galab *Yahya Goba *Shafal Mosed *Yaseinn Taher ==Background== The six men traveled from the United States to Afghanistan in spring 2001, before the September 11 attacks, while the country was still ruled by the Taliban. Its leaders were giving sanctuary to Osama bin Laden, the Saudi Arabian Muslim who used it as a base for Al Qaeda terrorist training.〔 In June 2001, an anonymous two-page handwritten letter was received from an individual ostensibly living in Lackawanna who knew the immigrant Yemeni population intimately. It warned, "I am very concern. I am an Arab-American... and I cannot give you my name because I fear for my life. Two terrorist came to Lackawanna... for recruiting the Yemenite youth... the terrorist group... left to Afghanistan to meet... bin Laden and stay in his camp for training", and gave the names of twelve local youths.〔 The group visited what later became known in the American media as the "al-Farooq terrorist training camp." That year, they returned to the United States. In the late summer of 2002, one of the members, Mukhtar al-Bakri, sent an e-mail message in which he described his upcoming wedding in Yemen, and another in which he mentioned a "big meal" after the wedding, which is traditional in Islam. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), who were monitoring him, sounded the alarm and al-Bakri was arrested by Bahraini police on the date of his wedding in September 2002. They found him in his hotel room with his new wife, where he was taken into custody by a Special Security Force Command tactical team.〔〔Suskind, R. ''The One Percent Doctrine〕 The other five were arrested in Lackawanna, New York, a suburb of Buffalo, New York in September 2002. On September 14, 2002, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) held a press conference in Buffalo to announce the arrests of five of the local Al Qaeda suspects. The FBI Special Agent in charge of the investigation, Peter Ahearn (At the time head of the FBI's Buffalo Field Office), stated that there was no specific event triggering the arrests, which followed four to eight months of investigations.〔 Later, FBI counterterrorism chief Dale Watson told ''The New York Times'' that the bureau acted as "we are probably 99 percent sure that we can make sure these guys don't do something – if they are planning to do something." Watson paraphrased the President's response as that "under the rules that we were playing under at the time, that's not acceptable. So a conscious decision was made, 'Let's get 'em out of here'."〔 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア(Wikipedia)』 ■ウィキペディアで「Buffalo Six」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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