Our colleague Bobby Ghosh sends in this report:
Two Georgia men have been sentenced to more than a decade in prison on terrorism charges. Ehsanul Islam Sadequee got 17 years and Syed Haris Ahmed got 13, for trying to aid terrorist groups by conducting surveillance in 2005 on several landmarks in the Washington DC area. Both men are U.S. citizens: Sadequee has Bangladeshi origins, while Ahmed is of Pakistani origin.
The two men shot 62 video clips: their targets included the Pentagon, a fuel depot, offices of the World Bank and a Masonic temple. They then sent these videos abroad; one of the recipients was a conduit to the Pakistani terrorist groups Lashkar e Taiba and Jaish Muhammed.
This is the third time in a month U.S. citizens have been connected to Pakistani terror groups. Chicago businessman David Coleman Headley has been accused of conducting surveillance for LeT in Mumbai ahead of last fall’s terror attack oin the Indian city. And Pakistani officials say the five Virginia men detained in that country last week tried, in vain, to join both Jaish and LeT.
Prosecutors said Sadequee and Ahmed developed a network of contacts with extremists in several countries, including Pakistan, Canada and the UK. They traveled to Canada and met with other terrorist suspects under federal investigation. Sadequee also visited Bangladesh in 2005, where he tried to hook up with LeT. The same year, Ahmed went to Pakistan, where he hoped join a militia, prosecutors said.