TerrorismThree charged in Brooklyn with training to be suicide bombers for al Shabab

Prosecutors say that three men facing federal terrorism charges in New York City have strong ties to al Shabab, the group responsible for the Nairobi mall attack.

Prosecutors in Brooklyn describe the defendants — Ali Yasin Ahmed, Madhi Hashi, and Mohamed Yusuf — as “dangerous and influential” members of al Shabab who were part of an elite unit of suicide bombers. They were captured in Africa last year while traveling to Yemen to team up with the al Qaeda offshoot there.

The three had links to al Qaeda operatives in East Africa “who sought to carry out attacks against the United States and Western interests in that region,” prosecutors wrote in a letter filed on 18 September.

The men are also accused of having “substantial knowledge regarding an al-Shabab research and development department that was developing chemical weapons for use.”

Fox News reports that shortly after the FBI took custody of the men in November, they pleaded not guilty in a sealed proceeding in federal court in Brooklyn to providing material support to al Shabab. The case has since been unsealed.

All three men are from Somalia. Ahmed, 27, and Yusuf, 29, have citizenship in Sweden and Hashi, 23, in Great Britain.

The three are charged that between 2008 and 2012 they traveled to Somalia to receive weapons and explosives training from al Shabab and were “deployed in combat operations” there.

“As alleged, these defendants are not aspiring terrorists — they are terrorists,” George Venizelos, head of the FBI’s New York office, said when the case was first announced. “They did more than receive terrorist training. They put that training to practice in terrorist operations.”

Fox News notes that government papers filed this year cited conversations intercepted by authorities in Sweden as evidence against the men.

In 2008 Ahmed and Yusuf “discussed … their intention to travel to Somalia for the purpose of joining al-Shabab and dying as martyrs,” papers filed with the court say. In another conversation, Ahmed said he was an associate of a suicide bomber who killed two dozen people, including three government ministers, at a hotel gathering in Mogadishu in 2009.

Ahmed was interviewed by authorities in 2008 but denied he was an al Shabab supporter, the papers say. By 2011, however, all three were in Somalia fighting for al Shabab and enrolled in a “suicide bomber training program,” the papers added.